A note of unease runs through Antonio Muñoz Molina’s novel “Your Steps on the Stairs” from its opening line. “I’ve moved to this city to wait for the end of the world,” Muñoz Molina’s narrator tells us. It’s not his apocalypticism that troubles — who among us isn’t thinking eschatologically these days? — so much as the first person singular: “I’ve moved.”

“Your Steps on the Stairs” by Antonio Muñoz Molina, translated from Spanish by Curtis Bauer. Other Press, 298 pages. $18.99, paperback 

Because as we soon learn, the narrator, a former businessman who recently left his deadening job in New York, has decamped to an apartment in Lisbon, one that he’s trying to set up before his beloved wife, Cecilia, arrives. “Now I go from one end of the apartment to the other making sure that everything is in place, as much like it was in the other apartment as possible, just like the way Cecilia arranged it over time,” he says. He worries over the noise of airplanes, trying to soundproof the bedroom against them, lest they disturb her. When their old coffee maker breaks in transit, he replaces it with another that is identical to it. (“Cecilia won’t notice the difference,” he insists to himself.) This will be their ongoing Eden in increasingly postlapsarian times, an oasis that will sustain the uninterrupted continuity of their long love. Whither, then, the plural? Why isn’t it “we” who have moved?

Much of the novel’s steady and quiet tension comes from the mystery of where Cecilia, a neuroscientist who studies the biochemistry of fear, is and when she will arrive. Her appearance is always “impending,” and yet the narrator, a man once governed by the corporate world’s regimented calendar, has lost all track of time’s passage. “As hard as I try right now I don’t know how many days or weeks I’ve been waiting for Cecilia,” he notes at one point, words sliding together in Curtis Bauer’s effortless translation of Muñoz Molina’s Spanish.

In the narrator’s reflections, time keeps slipping, his solitary life in Lisbon and his years with Cecilia in New York phasing in and out. The gap between then and now often goes unmarked as he shifts from one moment to the other, his languid pivots suggesting that he has simply walked through a door in his new home into a room of the one he left behind. In particular, he returns again and again to the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, when his relationship with Cecilia was still new and she was forced to abandon her downtown apartment for his, further uptown. “Life in New York teaches you to resist any romanticism, even if it’s because of romanticism that you have come to New York,” he observes in his winningly aphoristic style. It’s clear, though, that his old life there with Cecilia was a woozy sort of romantic dream. One wonders: Was it so for her, too?

Occasional visitors (a preternaturally competent handyman, the cleaning lady, a friend from the States) interrupt the narrator’s solitude, but his only real companion in Lisbon is his dog, Luria. Named by Cecilia after an influential Soviet neuroscientist, Luria is one of the most charming canine creations in all of fiction, mostly because the narrator speaks of her with such bemused affection. At the botanic garden, she “watches the peacocks with reverence and intrigue and runs after the geese with a viciousness as absurd as the fondness she has, if I’m not careful, for eating their feces.” At home, she “prefers contemplation to physical exercise, the music of Ornette Coleman and Ligeti to the rowdy company of other dogs.”

There is almost always a narcissistic shade to our appreciation for dogs, since what we love most about them arises from their love for us. In this regard, Muñoz Molina’s narrator is no better than the rest of us, though he may be more honest, especially when he speaks appreciatively of how Luria watches him “with admiration.” But she also stands as the external embodiment of his patient, if slightly uncomprehending, love for his brilliant wife. Walking Lisbon’s sloping, cobblestoned streets, dog and master seem to slow time together, becoming “equals in concentration, in the intensity of our waiting.”

The narrator is fascinated by the mechanics of Luria’s mind, but this is ultimately a novel of the human interior. Like the best novels about that interiority, it tiptoes elegantly along the wavy line between realism and delirium. Muñoz Molina’s assured style belies and complicates the narrator’s confidence that Cecilia will soon appear, all while leaving us wondering why she hasn’t yet. Love can obscure even as it illuminates: We don’t doubt that the narrator adores his wife, but, confined as we are by his perspective, it is never entirely clear that he sees how she sees him.

“Your Steps on the Stairs” unfolds against a background of escalating climate-change-fueled disasters and spiraling political unrest, but it is also a novel of Armageddons that always seem to be happening elsewhere. In Germany, extreme heat damages the Hanover airport runway, stranding travelers during the first Trump administration; years before, New Yorkers watch the 9/11 attacks on television screens, even as buildings burn just miles away. “The end of the world is a common occurrence,” the narrator says. “An apocalypse could be happening anywhere at this very moment.”

There’s a perverse reassurance in this proclamation: So long as the world is actively ending over there, it must, perforce, continue over here. Those of us without bunkers and private islands can still hide from the end, at least for a while, if only in the welcome shade of a bedroom by the sea, and it becomes increasingly clear that Muñoz Molina’s narrator is doing just that in his own small way. The question of why he’s behaving as he does remains ambiguous until the book’s final pages, but he can only postpone the end for so long. Etymologically, “apocalypse” implies revelation. Its clarifying light must come for us all, even those of us blinded to the world by our insistence on the love we cultivate within.