In the Night of Time by Antonio Muñoz Molina

body and soul to his writing. No one was going to consider him for the post of general secretary of the Summer University in Santander, as they had with Pedro Salinas, who complained so much about the lack of quiet and time but looked so pleased with himself in photographs of official engagements. It isn’t at all difficult for me to imagine him, José Moreno Villa, used to the benevolent hospitality of the Student Residence, a man close to fifty, often no more than a secondary guest in photographs of other, more important people, always discreet, elusive, formal, at times not even identified by name, unrecognized, without the open smile or arrogant pose the others display as if their place in posterity could be taken for granted. He isn’t young and doesn’t dress as if he were, doesn’t have the air of a literary figure or professor but rather of what he actually does for a living: a functionary in a certain position, not a clerk but not a high-ranking employee either, perhaps an attorney or a person of some means in a provincial capital who doesn’t attend Mass or hide his Republican sympathies but would never go out without a tie and hat; a man who looked older than he was long before his hair turned gray, who at the age of forty-eight supposes with a mixture of melancholy and relief that no great changes in his life await him.
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    The footsteps had taken him out of his self-absorption—profound and at the same time bare of reflection and almost of memory, filled above all with indolence and something else not very different from it, the attentive contemplation of a small canvas where he’d sketched a few tenuous lines in charcoal, and a bowl of seasonal fruit brought up at midday from the Residence dining room: a quince, a pomegranate, an apple, a bunch of grapes. He’d cleared away some papers and books from the table so the clean forms would stand out. He’d been observing the slow descent of light from the window as it made the volumes look denser, their shadows accentuated, every color slightly muted. The red of the pomegranate turned the color of polished leather; the dusty gold of the quince shone with greater intensity as the twilight enveloped the space, no longer reflecting light but radiating it; light slid over the apple as if it were a ball of oiled wood, yet it acquired a degree of moist density when it touched the skin of the grapes. Perhaps the grapes were too sensual, too tactile for the purpose he’d just begun to anticipate, half closing his eyes. They’d have to be ascetic grapes like those of Juan Gris or Sánchez Cotán, carved in a single visual volume, without that slightly sticky suggestion accentuated by the ripe afternoon sun, a Sorolla sun, sifted with the same soft dust that the rough surface of the quince left on his fingers, in his nostrils.
    Under the fruit bowl was a page from the magazine
Estampa:
AN ENCHANTER FROM CAIRO WHO BEWITCHES WOMEN AND PREDICTS THE FUTURE COMES TO MADRID. The words “Madrid” and “future” were as spellbinding as the forms of the fruits. Each time he prepared to paint something, there was a moment of revelation and another of discouragement, just as when the first line of a poem appeared unexpectedly in his mind. How can one take the next step in the empty space that is a blank sheet of paper or canvas? Perhaps the very texture, the resistance or softness of the paper, could indicate a way. He could go on and realize he’d ruined the attempt: the second verse was forced, not worthy of the sudden illumination of the first, a useless blot on that grand expanse of paper. The revelation seemed to be lost without his knowing how to recapture it; the feeling of failure stayed with him, and to begin work it was necessary, if not to conquer it, at least to resist it, to take the first steps as if he didn’t feel its leaden weight. But in everything he’d undertaken, the same thing occurred: