In the Night of Time by Antonio Munoz Molina

Author:Antonio Munoz Molina
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

From the time she was very young, her urge to express herself had been as powerful as her desire to learn. Writing letters was an exercise of talent that hadn’t found its true channel until then, not in the literary attempts she showed no one, not in her journals, not in the articles she sent to the Brooklyn paper that asked her for more political analyses and fewer observations on the daily life of Spaniards. When she wrote letters she felt the new exaltation of having an interlocutor with whom there would be no misunderstandings, because his intelligence was a challenge and a complement to hers, and because basically they resembled each other a great deal, a fact they hadn’t needed more than a few minutes to recognize. Everything was memorable and new and deserved to be celebrated; wandering through Madrid produced euphoria. Explaining in a letter to the man she hadn’t known until a short time ago the most secret ambitions in her life and the nuances of the sexual passion it seemed they’d awakened to together was for her an unsurpassed experience: her hand flew over the paper, ink flowed from the pen, forming volutes of words in which her will almost didn’t intervene, words erupting with the memory of something that had occurred barely a few hours earlier, desire reborn in its invocation as it was sometimes in a distracted caress that made them return unexpectedly from the edge of exhaustion. (The book was somehow also in those letters. The book was in everything she did, yet it slipped away when she began looking for it consciously, when she sat in front of the typewriter searching, hoping for a first word that would unleash everything.) They told each other what they’d done and what they’d felt, and anticipated what they’d do when they met again, all they hadn’t dared to suggest or ask for aloud. A letter was a confession and an account of desire and also a brazen way of inciting passion in the other: as you’re reading, do what I imagine doing to you, let your hand move, guided by mine; let it be my hand caressing you though you’re not with me. How strange that it took them so long to become aware of the danger, to discover there was a price and damage and no remedy for the affront once it was committed. Each word an injury, the thread of ink a trail of poison.

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