Free In the Night of Time by Antonio Muñoz Molina Page A

moving his head away slightly, as if before leaving he’d already stopped being there. An indolent Moreno Villa doesn’t walk him to the door but sinks deeper into the easy chair, as if trying to hide his loose, stained painting trousers and flannel slippers.
    â€œYou still haven’t told me what you’ll do when University City is finished,” he says.
    â€œI’ll let you know when I have time to think about it,” says Ignacio Abel, compensating with a smile for the recovered stiffness of a very busy man.
    The door closes, and the footsteps storm down the hall, and in the silence of the room the distant noises of the city filter in, along with the sounds of the Residence and the athletic fields where isolated exclamations from players and the whistles of referees can be heard. Closer, though he can’t identify where it’s coming from, Moreno Villa listens to a burst of piano music that becomes lost in the other sounds and returns again, a song that brings to his mind, stripped now of grief but not of melancholy, a red-haired girl he said goodbye to in New York more than six years earlier.

4
    A S SOON AS HE leans back in the seat, Ignacio Abel is overcome by uncertainty. Suppose he’s on the wrong train? The train begins to move and that brief moment of calm turns to alarm. I observe the automatic gesture of his right hand, which had rested, open, on his thigh and now contracts to search for his ticket; the hand that so often rummages, investigates, recognizes, driven by fear of losing something, the one that rubs his face, rough with the unwanted beginning of his beard, touches the worn collar of his shirt, finally closes with a slight tremor, holding the discovered document; the hand that has not touched anyone for so long. On the other side of the tracks sits an identical train that remains motionless, and perhaps that is the one he should have taken. In less than a second he is a bundle of nerves again. At the slightest suspicion of a threat, every fiber in his body tightens to the limit of its resistance. Now he can’t find the ticket. He pats his pockets and doesn’t remember that a while ago he put it in his briefcase to be sure it wouldn’t become entangled in his fingers and fall out accidentally when he looked for something else in his trouser pockets, jacket pockets, raincoat pockets—the haunts of tiny, useless objects, breadcrumbs, coins of little value from several countries. He touches the edge of the postcard he didn’t mail. At the bottom of some pocket, the keys to his apartment in Madrid jingle. He feels the telegram, a corner of the envelope that contains the letter from his wife.
I know you’d rather not hear what I have to say to you.
He finally opens the briefcase and sees the edge of the ticket, his deep sigh of relief coinciding with the discovery that he’s again been the victim of an optical illusion: the train that’s started to move is the one at the next platform, an identical train from which, for a few seconds, a stranger has been looking at him. So he still has time to double-check. A porter has come into the car, dragging a trunk. Ignacio Abel goes up to him and shows him his ticket, attempting to pronounce a sentence that’s been clear in his mind but breaks down into nonsense as he struggles to articulate it. The porter wipes his forehead with a handkerchief as red as his cap and says something that must be simple but Ignacio doesn’t understand it at first. The man’s gesture is as unmistakable as his weary, friendly smile, and after a few seconds, like a clap of thunder after lightning, every word acquires delayed meaning in Ignacio’s mind:
You can be damn sure you’re on your way up to old Rhineberg, sir.
    Â 
    The ticket is for this train and no other. He knew it, but anxiety got the best of him: like an intruder, it usurped the movement of his hands, accelerated the beating of his heart, and