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

pressed against his chest, lodging like a parasite inside the empty shell of his previous existence. In his heart, he no longer believes he can ever go back. Who’ll undo what has been done, raise what’s fallen, restore what’s turned to ashes and smoke? Would the human flesh rotting beneath the ground rise up if the trumpets of the resurrection were to sound? Who’ll erase the words, spoken and written, that sought to legitimize the crime and make it seem not only respectable and heroic but necessary? Who’ll open the door no one is knocking on now, pleading for refuge? Sounds travel at a perceptible though infinitesimally slow rate between his ear and the circuits in his brain where words are deciphered. He sits down again, breathing deeply, his face against the window, looking at the subterranean platform, a stab of pain near his heart, trying to calm down, waiting. In his mind two clocks show two different times, like two discordant pulsations he might detect by pressing two different points on his body. It’s four in the afternoon and it’s ten at night. In Madrid it’s been dark for several hours, and only the dim light of a few street lamps, the globes painted blue, can be seen in the deserted streets. Sometimes the headlights of a car driving at top speed emerge from around a corner, the tires screeching against the paving stones, mattresses tied haphazardly to the roof as an absurd protection, acronyms scrawled with a paintbrush on the side panels, a rifle protruding from the window, perhaps the ghostly face of someone whose hands are tied, who knows he is on the way to his death. (They didn’t bother to tie his legs; he was so docile they probably didn’t think it was necessary.) In the house in the Sierra where his children may still be living, they can hear in the darkness the dry thump of the pendulum and the mechanism of a clock that always runs slow. In the Sierra de Guadarrama the nights are cold now and the smell of damp rotting leaves and pine needles rises from the earth. Over the dark city, on the first clear nights of autumn just a few weeks earlier, the sky recovered its forgotten splendor, the powerful radiance of the Milky Way, which revived old fears from his childhood nested in the memories of a Madrid that predated electricity and the endless streams of headlights running down the streets. With the war, darkness returned to the city along with the night terrors of children’s folktales. As a boy, he’d wake up in his tiny room in the porter’s lodging and stare at faint yellow gaslights from the small barred window at the height of the sidewalk. He would listen to the footsteps and the pounding of the metal tip of the night watchman’s pike on the paving stones, his slow, frightening steps like the steps of the bogeyman himself. Many years later, in a darkened Madrid, footsteps and pounding were once again emissaries of panic: the elevator noises in the middle of the night, the heels of boots in the hallway, rifle butts banging on the door, resounding inside one’s chest to the accelerated rhythm of one’s heart, as if two hearts were beating simultaneously.
Ignacio, for the sake of all you love best, open the door, they’re going to kill me.
Now the train is really moving, but slowly, with powerful majesty and the vigor of its electric locomotive, granting intact the happiness of every journey’s start: perfect absolution for the next two hours when nothing unforeseen can happen. A brief future with no potential surprises on the horizon is a gift he’s learned to appreciate in recent months. He felt the same way, only more so, in the port of Saint-Nazaire when the SS
Manhattan
pulled away from the pier, the deep howling of the siren in the air, the engine’s vibration rattling the metal beneath his feet and the railing where he rested his hands as if on the metal of a balcony on a high floor. When he looked down at the