Read Online In the Night of Time by Antonio Muñoz Molina - Free Book Online

was walking absent-mindedly under the trees on the Paseo de Recoletos when an enormous black car stopped beside him, the horn sounding hoarsely. The back door opened and inside sat Bergamín, sporting a tailcoat, puffing a cigarette, inviting him in with a big smile. Dalí would soon be as rich and despotic as Picasso: never again would he send him, Moreno Villa, a postcard filled with declarations of admiration and gratitude and spelling mistakes, and Dalí would never say his name when he mentioned the teachers from whom he’d learned, or tell who’d been the first to show him photographs of the new German portraits that with astonishing technique and in a fully modern manner recaptured the realism of Holbein. Lorca would never recognize his debt to him either, but he’d been the first to juxtapose avant-garde poetic expression and the meter of popular ballads, he who had long ago traveled to New York and conceived of a poetry and prose that corresponded to the city’s agitation, the noise of elevated trains and the discordant sounds of jazz bands. In fact, Lorca had the nerve to give a reading in the Residence of poems and prose impressions of New York, illustrating it with musical recordings and slides, and not to mention Moreno Villa, sitting in the first row, once as an early pioneer.
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    The celebrity of others made him invisible; better to erase his existence so his shadow would not be projected in a revealing way onto the triumphal faces of those who owed him so much. If not greatness, then retirement. Writing verses with a passion that was sabotaged by his own apathy to things, knowing that for some reason they would repel success. Investigating things in archives no one had visited for centuries, the lives of dwarves and buffoons in the gloomy courts of Felipe IV and Carlos II. Not thinking about all the work completed, or the dubious future of his painting, or its probable distance from a style he didn’t care about but that pained him like an insult to all the years he’d devoted to painting with no recognition. Not imagining oneself a painter: limiting one’s expectations, the field of vision. Concentrating on the relatively simple but still inexhaustible problem of representing on a small canvas that bowl with a few pieces of fruit. But what if he really deserved the mediocre place where he’d been relegated? Perhaps, after all, it wasn’t that Lorca had silenced the debt he owed him but simply hadn’t read his poems about New York and the book of prose pieces about the city written on his return trip and then published serially in
El Sol,
to unanimous indifference. (In Madrid there didn’t seem to be much interest in the outside world: he went to the café the day following his return from New York, excited by all the stories he had to tell, and his friends received him as if he hadn’t been away and didn’t ask a single question.) What if he’d become old and was being poisoned by what he’d always disliked most, resentment? Juan Ramón Jiménez, who was actually more accomplished, was infected by an ignoble bitterness, an obsessive mean-spiritedness fed by any small slight, imagined or real, by each scintilla of recognition not dedicated to him, muddied water that debased his luminous talent. How sordid it would be if one lacked not only talent but nobility as well and allowed oneself to be hopelessly intoxicated by an aging man’s rancor toward those who are younger, by the affront of feeling offended by the jealously observed good fortune of others who didn’t even notice him, who insulted him by achieving with no apparent effort what had been denied to him, when he was the more deserving. But did he really want to be like Lorca, his success hovering between folklore and bullfights, his fondness for the parties of diplomats and duchesses? Hadn’t he told himself at some point that his secret models were Antonio Machado