In the Night of Time

1

SURROUNDED BY the confusion in Pennsylvania Station, Ignacio Abel stopped when he heard someone call his name. I see him first at a distance in the rush-hour crowd, a male figure identical to all the others, as in a photograph of the time, dwarfed by the immense scale of the architecture: light topcoats, raincoats, hats; women’s hats, the brims at a slant and small feathers on the sides; the red visored caps of porters and railroad employees; faces blurred in the distance; coats open, the coattails flying backward because of an energetic pace; human currents that intersect but never collide, each man and woman a figure similar to the rest and yet endowed with an identity as undeniable as the unique trajectory each follows to a specific destination — directional arrows, blackboards displaying the names of places and the hours of departure and arrival, metal stairs that resound and tremble beneath a gallop of footsteps, clocks hanging from iron arches or crowning the large vertical calendars that are visible from across the station. It was necessary to know it all precisely: the letters and numbers bright red like the caps of station porters that day in late October 1936. On the illuminated sphere of each of the clocks, hanging like captive globes high above the heads of the crowd, it is ten minutes to four. At that moment Ignacio Abel moves through the lobby of the station, through the great expanse of marble, high iron arches, and dirty glass vaults filtering a golden light where all the dust floats alongside the clamor of voices and footsteps.

I saw him with increasing clarity, emerging out of nowhere, almost a figment of my imagination, holding his suitcase, tired after dashing up the staircase at the entrance, through the oblique shadows of the marble columns, and into that enormous space where he might not find his way in time. I distinguished him from the others, with whom he almost merges, a dark suit, an identical raincoat, a hat, clothes perhaps too formal for this city and this time of year, European clothes, like the suitcase he carries, solid and expensive, its leather worn after so much traveling, covered by hotel and steamship-company stickers, the remains of chalk marks and customs stamps, a suitcase that weighs a great deal for his hand, aching from gripping the handle so hard. With the precision of a police report and a dream, I discover the actual details. I see them rise in front of me and crystallize at the very moment Ignacio Abel stops in the powerful currents of the crowd and turns, as if he had heard his name: someone must have seen him and shouted his name in order to be heard over the clamor, amplified by the marble walls and iron vaults, the resounding confusion of footsteps, voices, trains, the vibration of the floor, the metallic echoes of the loudspeaker announcements, the shouts of newsboys yelling the afternoon news. I feel through his mind just as I feel through his pockets or the inside of his suitcase. Ignacio Abel looks at the front pages of newspapers expecting and fearing to see a headline in which the word “Spain” appears, the word “war,” the word “Madrid.” And he looks at the face of every woman of a specific age and height, foolishly hoping that chance will allow him to see his lost lover, Judith Biely. In the lobbies and on the platforms of train stations, in the sheds of port installations, on the sidewalks of Paris and New York, for the past few weeks he has crossed entire forests of unknown faces that continue to multiply in his imagination when sleep begins to weigh down his eyes. Faces and voices, names, phrases in English that he hears at random and that remain hanging in air like streamers. I told you we were late but you never listen to me and now we’re gonna miss that goddam train. The voice also seemed to be speaking to him, so hesitant in his practical decisions, so awkward with people, holding his suitcase, in his worn European suit, vaguely funereal, like the suit of his friend Professor Rossman when he first appeared in Madrid. In his overstuffed wallet Ignacio Abel carries a picture of Judith Biely and another of his children, Lita and Miguel, smiling on a Sunday morning a few months earlier — the two broken halves of his life, once incompatible, both lost now. He knows if you look at photographs too many times they no longer invoke a presence. The faces let go of their singularity, just as an article of intimate clothing treasured by a lover soon loses the intensely desirable scent of the one who wore it. In the police-file photos in Madrid the faces of the dead, the murdered, have been so severely disfigured that not even their closest relatives can identify them. What will his children see now if they look through the family albums, so carefully catalogued by their mother, for the face they have not seen for the past three months and don’t know if they will see again, the one no longer identical to the face they remember? The father who fled, they will be told, the deserter, the one who chose to go to the other side, to take a train one Sunday afternoon and pretend nothing had happened, that he would return calmly to their summer house the following Saturday (though if he had stayed, it’s very likely he’d be dead now). I see him, tall, foreign, thin by comparison with his passport photo, taken only at the beginning of June and yet at another time, before the bloody, deluded summer in Madrid and the beginning of the journey that perhaps will end in a few hours; his movements are hesitant, frightened among all those people who know their exact destinations and advance toward him with an unyielding energy, a powerful determination of husky shoulders, raised chins, flexible knees. He has heard an improbable voice speak his name, but as soon as he turns he knows no one called him, and yet he looks with that same automatic hope, seeing only the irritated faces of people now delayed, enormous men with light eyes and inflamed faces, chewing on cigars. Don’t you have eyes in your head, you moron? In the hostility of strangers, eyes never play a part. In Madrid right now, looking away from a stare is one of the new strategies for survival. You better not seem afraid or you’ll automatically become suspect. The voice actually heard or only imagined in a kind of acoustical mirage has produced in him the response of a man about to fall asleep who thinks he has tripped on a step and either wakes startled or sinks back into sleep. But he knows he has heard his name with absolute clarity, not shouted by someone who wants to attract his attention in the noisy crowd but softly, almost a murmur, Ignacio, Ignacio Abel, a familiar voice he can’t identify but is on the verge of recognizing. He doesn’t even know whether it’s the voice of a man or a woman, the voice of someone dead or alive. On the other side of his locked door in Madrid, he heard a voice repeating his name in a hoarse, pleading tone. There he stood in silence, holding his breath, not moving in the dark, not opening the door.

In recent months you can no longer be sure about certain things, can’t know whether a friend, seen a few days or only hours ago, is still alive. Once death and life had clearer, more precise boundaries. You send letters and postcards and don’t know whether they’ll reach their destination, and if they do, whether the one who should have received them is alive or still at that address. You dial the telephone and there’s no answer, or the voice at the other end belongs to a stranger. You pick up the receiver to speak with someone or get information and the line is dead. You turn on the faucet and water may not come out. The customary, automatic actions are canceled by uncertainty. Ordinary streets in Madrid abruptly end in a barricade or a trench or a heap of rubble left by an exploded bomb. On the sidewalk, turning a corner, you can see in the first light of day a rigid body pushed against a building that served as a blank wall for a firing squad the night before, the half-closed eyes, the yellowed face, the upper lip contracted into a smile that reveals teeth, the top of the head blown off by a shot fired from a few inches away. The phone rings in the middle of the night and you’re afraid to pick up the receiver. You hear the elevator motor or the doorbell in your sleep and can’t tell whether it’s a real threat or only a nightmare. So far from Madrid yet Ignacio Abel still thinks of those fearful nights and months of insomnia, fearful nights in the present tense. Distance doesn’t cancel the verbal tense of fear. In the hotel room where he has spent four nights, the deafening noise of enemy planes woke him; he opened his eyes and it was the rattle of an elevated train. The voices continue to reach him: who has called his name just now, as I saw him standing motionless in his open raincoat, holding his suitcase, wearing the anxious expression of someone who looks at clocks and signs afraid he’ll miss a train; what absent voice imposed itself above the uproar of real life, calling him, Ignacio, Ignacio Abel, urging him to run faster or to stop and turn around and go back?

Now I see him much more clearly, isolated in that instant of immobility, encircled by sudden gestures, hostile looks, the rush of the crowd, tired after working in offices, hurrying to catch trains, driven by obligations and trapped by the spider webs of relationships he lacks, like a vagrant or a lunatic, though in his pocket he carries a valid passport and in his hands the train ticket and his suitcase, the battered yet still distinguished suitcase I can almost see as if through Ignacio Abel’s weary, avid eyes. I see the hand clutching the leather handle, feel the excessive tension of his grip, the pain in his joints from repeating this action for over two weeks, when the same figure of a tall, middle-aged man, now lost in the crowd, walked alone at night along a street in Madrid where the streetlights were out or broken or painted blue and the only light filtered through the closed shutters of a few windows. The same figure, cut out of the photograph of Pennsylvania Station and inserted in a Madrid street, Calle Alfonso XII perhaps (the name was changed and for a time it was called Niceto Alcalá-Zamora; now it has been changed again and is called Reforma Agraria), or walking past Retiro Park fifteen or twenty days earlier on his way to the train station, staying close to the walls, his suitcase banging against the corners as he tries to disappear into the shadows. In the silence of a curfew, an approaching car can mean only danger, even if all your documents are in order. He would have to know the exact departure date, but he hasn’t kept count of the number of days he’s been traveling, and time moves away very quickly in the past. A city in the dark, besieged by fear, shaken by the sound of battle, the engines of planes that approach but are still no more than an echo of distant misfortune. He looks at one of the clocks hanging from the iron arches and calculates that for several hours it has been night in Madrid, as the minute hand advances with an identical spasm in all the illuminated spheres, jumping from eight to seven, a stroke of time like an urgent heartbeat, the step one takes into the void on falling asleep: seven minutes to four; the train he’s supposed to catch leaves at four and he has no idea where to go, which of the paths intersecting in the crowd like currents on the ocean’s surface is the one that will carry him to his destination. As in a lucid dream, now that he has turned I can see his face, close, just as he saw it this morning after wiping the steam from the mirror at which he was going to shave in the hotel room where he spent four nights and to which he knows he’ll never return. Now the doors close forever behind him, and his presence disappears without a trace. He walks along the hotel corridor, turns a corner, and it’s as if he’d never been there. I saw him shave this morning at the mirror over the sink in the room he knew he was finally about to leave, thanks to the telegram he’d received a few hours earlier, the one lying open on the night table, next to his wallet and his reading glasses and the letter handed to him yesterday afternoon, the one he almost tore up after he read it. Dear Ignacio, I hope this letter finds you well your children and I are fine and safe thank God, no small thing these days though it seems you haven’t worried too much about finding out how we are. The telegram contains a brief apology for the days of waiting, as well as information regarding the train and its departure time and the name of the station where he’ll be picked up. The letter was written and mailed almost three months ago and reached him at this hotel in New York owing to a series of accidents he cannot quite explain, as if the very density of the rancor its words exhale (rancor or something else that for the moment he prefers not to name, or doesn’t know how to) guided it in its dogged search for him. Nothing is how it once was, and there’s no reason to think that after the upheaval things will go back to the way they were. A letter sent to Madrid from a village in the Sierra is lost en route and it takes not two days but three months to arrive after passing through Red Cross headquarters in Paris and an office of the Spanish postal service where someone stamped the envelope several times: Unknown at this address.

Ignacio Abel has been away from his home in Madrid for so short a time and already he’s a stranger. I see the envelope in the light of the lamp on the night table in the gloomy room where the noise of an elevated train sounded regularly. Once again Ignacio Abel packed the suitcase lying open on the bed, and shaved more carefully than in recent days now that he knew people were expecting him, that at six this evening someone would be on a platform trying to make out his face among the passengers getting off at the station with the strange Germanic name printed now on his ticket: Rhineberg. He’ll get off the train and someone will be waiting for him. He’ll hear his name and a part of his suspended existence will be reimposed on him. It matters a great deal to him not to cave in, not to let himself go, to fight with small acts of resistance the entropy of solitary travel, to tend to every detail as one does when constructing a building but forgoes in the sketch of its model. He must shave every morning, though the shaving soap is running out and the razor is losing its edge and the badger brush its hairs, one by one. He must do what he can to keep his shirt collar from looking soiled. But he has only three shirts and they’re wearing out from so much washing. The cuffs and collars are fraying, the creases in his trousers are becoming threadbare, his shoelaces are unraveling. He was fastening his shirt this morning and discovered that one of the buttons had fallen off, and even if he could find it, he wouldn’t know how to sew it back on. I see Ignacio Abel as if I were seeing myself, with his maniacal attention to detail, his incessant desire to understand everything, his fear of missing something of consequence, his anguish over the passage of time, its crushing slowness when it becomes waiting. He feels his face after shaving, rubbing it with a little lotion from the almost empty bottle he brought from Madrid, and I feel the touch of my fingers on my face. On a journey things wear out or are lost and there’s no time to replace them, or you don’t know how or how many days are left before you reach your destination, how much longer you’ll have to make your increasingly meager funds last, the bills in your wallet, the coins in your pockets, the trifles kept for no reason and eventually lost: subway tokens or telephone slugs, a train ticket, an unused stamp, the ticket stub from a movie house where he waited out of the rain and watched a film not understanding a word of what was said. I want to enumerate these things just as he does on many nights when he returns to his room and methodically empties his pockets onto the night table as he used to empty them on the desk in his study in Madrid, his office at University City; I want to search Ignacio Abel’s pockets, the lining of his jacket, the inner band of his hat, with the touch of his fingers; listen to the clink in his raincoat pocket of the keys to his house in Madrid; know each object and each paper left on the night table and dresser in the hotel room, the ones he has kept as he hurried out to Pennsylvania Station and the ones left behind that will be tossed into the trash by the cleaning woman who makes the bed and opens the window to let in the October air that smells of soot and the river, laundry steam and cooking grease: transient things that contain a fact, an indelible moment, the name of a movie house, the receipt for a fast meal in a cafeteria, a calendar page that has a precise date on the front and on the back a hurriedly scrawled telephone number. In his study, in a drawer he always locked, he kept Judith Biely’s letters and photographs along with any small object that had something to do with her or had belonged to her — a box of matches, a lipstick, a coaster from the Palace Hotel nightclub with the circle made by Judith’s glass. People’s souls are not in photographs but in the small things they touched, in the ones that bore the warmth of their hands. With the help of his reading glasses he searched for her through the columns of tiny names in the Manhattan phone book and was moved when he recognized it among the names of so many strangers, as if he had seen a familiar face in the middle of a crowd or heard her voice. Close variants complicated the search: Bily, Bialy, Bieley. In one of the wooden phone booths that lined the back of the hotel lobby he asked for the number listed next to the name Biely and listened to the ring, his heart racing, afraid he would hang up the moment someone answered. But the operator told him there was no answer and he remained sitting in the booth, receiver in hand, until someone’s banging on the glass pulled him out of his self-absorption.

Extreme precision matters. Nothing real is vague. In his suitcase Ignacio Abel carries his architect’s diploma, signed by Professors Walter Gropius and Karl Ludwig Rossman in Weimar in May 1924. He knows the value of exact measurements, the calculations of the resistance of materials, the balance between contrary forces that keeps a building standing. What could have happened to the engineer Torroja, with whom he liked to talk about the physical foundations of construction, learning disturbing facts about the ultimate insubstantiality of matter, the demented agitation of particles in the void. The sketches in the notebook he carries in one of his pockets will be worthless if they’re not subjected to the illuminating disciplines of physics and geometry. What were the words of Juan Ramón Jiménez that seemed like the summary of a treatise on architecture? The pure, the precise, the synthesizing, the unambiguous. Ignacio Abel made note of them on a slip of paper and read them aloud at the Student Residence during the lecture he gave the previous year, October 7, 1935. Nothing occurs in an abstract time or a blank space. An arch is a line drawn on a sheet of paper and the solution to a mathematical problem, weight transformed into lightness through the interplay of contrary forces, visual thought converted into habitable space. A stairway is an abstract form as necessary and pure as the spiral of a shell, as organic as the arborescent veins of a leaf. At the top of a wooded hill, in a place Ignacio Abel has yet to visit, the white structure of a library already exists in his imagination and in the sketches in his notebooks. Beneath the iron arches and glass vaults of Pennsylvania Station, in the air flecked with dust and smoke, shaken by the din of concave spaces, the clocks mark a precise time: in a rapid spasm the eye barely perceives, the minute hand has just advanced to five minutes to four. The ticket Ignacio Abel holds in his lightly sweating left hand is for a train that leaves at four from a platform whose location he still doesn’t know. In the inside pocket of his raincoat he has the passport that was on the night table next to his wallet this morning, and a written, stamped postcard he forgot to mail in the hotel lobby is now in a jacket pocket next to the letter he didn’t tear into pieces. Two children growing up without a father at their most difficult age and in these times and my having to rear them all alone. The postcard is a color photograph of the Empire State Building seen at night, with rows of lit windows and a zeppelin moored to its splendid steel spike. Every time he traveled he sent daily postcards to his children. He’s continued to do so this time but doesn’t know whether they’ll reach their destination; he writes the names and address as if repeating an incantation, as if his obstinacy in sending the cards would be enough to prevent their being lost, like the impetus and aim with which one fires an arrow, or the meticulous resentment with which his wife enumerated each of her complaints in writing. Dear Lita, Dear Miguel, this is the tallest building in the world. I’d have liked to see New York from the sky, up in a zeppelin with you. In the ink-blue sky of the postcard a full yellow moon and conical reflectors illuminate the futuristic silhouette of the dirigible. Postcards and letters go astray now in the convulsive geography of the war. Adela’s letter and the telegram temporarily rescued Ignacio Abel from his gradual nonexistence in the hotel room, where for four days the telephone didn’t ring and no one said his name or even had the most incidental conversation with him. He also carries in a pocket the belated welcoming telegram from Professor Stevens, chairman of the Department of Architecture and Fine Arts at Burton College, the letter in which, through a hallucination of desire, he recognized Judith Biely’s hand, if only for a few seconds, as clearly as he heard her voice in Pennsylvania Station. Except he didn’t, and the writing doesn’t resemble hers at all. Last night, before turning off the light, Ignacio Abel read all of Adela’s letter and put it back in its envelope, leaving it on the night table next to his passport and wallet and reading glasses, resisting without difficulty the temptation to tear it up. In the room’s imperfect darkness, submerged in the hoarse vibration of the city that enveloped him like the incessant tremor of the ship’s machinery during his six-day voyage across the Atlantic, Ignacio Abel watched his wife’s old-fashioned delicate writing glide before his eyes, and in his wakefulness the words in the letter took on her monotonous voice with its simultaneous catalogue of reproaches and a sort of indestructible tenderness against which he had no defenses.

After several days of waiting, time again accelerated in a disquieting way. It was almost three-thirty when he looked at his watch, and the train for Rhineberg left at four. It had become so late that he slammed shut the suitcase on the bed and realized only as he was opening the door that he had left his passport on the night table. He shuddered at the thought of leaving without it. An entire catastrophe can be contained in a moment’s carelessness. They were less than a minute away from killing him on that night in late July he often dreams about, when a voice saying his name in the darkness saved him: Don Ignacio, calm down, nothing’s going to happen. The blue passport with the seal of the Spanish Republic was issued in the middle of June; the year’s visa for the United States is dated early October (but everything takes so long, it doesn’t seem it’ll ever arrive). The photograph is of a huskier man, not exactly younger but less mistrustful, with a less insecure expression and eyes that will always have something furtive about them but rest on the camera lens with serenity, even with a touch of arrogance, accentuated by the excellent cut of his jacket, a crisply folded handkerchief and fountain pen in the breast pocket, the silky gleam of his tie, the obvious quality of his shirt. At each sentry post along the borders Ignacio Abel has crossed in recent weeks, the guards compared more and more slowly the face in the passport to that of the man who presented it to them with a docile expression that gradually grew more nervous. In this accelerated time, photographs don’t take long to become unfaithful. Ignacio Abel looks at his passport photograph and sees the face of someone who has become a stranger and ultimately generates no sympathy in him, not even nostalgia. Nostalgia, or rather a longing as physical as a disease, is what he feels for Judith Biely and his children, not for the man he was a few months earlier, and even less so before the war. Ignacio Abel’s eyes have seen things the man in the photograph, whose assurance is petulance, or worse, blindness, doesn’t suspect. A step away from the future explosion that will turn everything upside down, he doesn’t sense its proximity and can’t imagine its horror.

Exact details: his passport has suffered the same deterioration as his clothes and suitcase; it has passed through too many hands, received the forceful impact of a good number of rubber stamps. The exit stamp from Spain has the badly printed red-and-black initials of the FAI, the Iberian Anarchist Federation, and the trace of dirty fingerprints. The hands of the French gendarme who inspected it only a few meters away were pale and bony and had shiny nails. His fingers handled the passport with the misgivings of someone who fears an infection. On the Spanish side, the Anarchist militiaman had stared at Ignacio Abel with a glint of threat and sarcasm, with contempt, letting him know he considered him a malingerer and a deserter, and though the militiaman let him pass, he didn’t renounce until the last moment the authority to seize the passport that meant nothing to him; the French gendarme, his head rigid above the hard collar of his uniform, had studied Ignacio Abel at length without ever looking him in the eye, without granting him that privilege (it requires training to examine someone’s face without meeting his eye). The French stamp, with a polished wooden handle, came down on the open passport with the crack of a metal spring. At every border someone will take his time studying the passport and any other document he feels like demanding, peer over his glasses with distrust, turn to a colleague or disappear behind a closed door, taking the suddenly suspicious document with him — someone who thinks of himself as a guardian, a master of the future of those who wait, admitting some, inscrutably rejecting others, taking his time to light a cigarette or exchange gossip with the clerk at the next table before turning back to the window and examining once again the person waiting, the one who knows he’s on the verge of salvation or damnation, of yes or no.

Perhaps today the enemy is in Madrid and the passport is no longer valid. On the floor of the hotel room, beside the bed, Ignacio Abel left a rumpled newspaper that the cleaning woman will throw into the trash without looking at it. INSURGENTS ADVANCE ON MADRID. The news item is three days old. INCENDIARY BOMBS FALL ON BATTERED CITY. In the middle of a sleepless night he listened to a news bulletin on the radio, read without pause in a nasal, high-pitched voice; the only word he could catch was “Madrid.” Between the advertising jingles and the whistles of static, the name sounded like a remote, exotic city lit by the brilliance of bombs. Perhaps by now his house is a pile of rubble and the country to which his passport belongs and on which his legal identity depends has ceased to exist. But at least the words “Spain” and “war” and “Madrid” were not on the front pages of newspapers at one of the station newsstands he glimpsed out of the corner of his eye. He looks at arrows, displays; he listens in passing to bursts of trivial conversations that become transparent and seem to refer to him or contain prophecies; one by one he examines the faces of all the women, not because he expects suddenly to see Judith Biely but because he doesn’t know how not to look for her. The mellow afternoon twilight descends diagonally through the glass of the vaulted ceiling and traces its broad parallel streaks stippled with dust on people’s heads. He tries to ask a porter in a dark blue uniform and red cap a question, but in the confusion his effort isn’t noticed. A column of people hurries toward a corridor under a large sign and an arrow: DEPARTING TRAINS.

How long had it been since he’d heard someone say his name out loud? If no one recognizes you and no one names you, little by little you cease to exist. He turned, knowing it couldn’t be true that someone was calling to him, but for a few seconds a reflexive impulse continued to affirm what his rational mind denied. The voices of the past, the ones that still reach him in his flight, join in a sound as powerful as the one that echoes beneath the iron-and-glass vaults of Pennsylvania Station. Distance in time and space is their acoustic chamber. He’s fallen asleep after lunch one Sunday in July in the house in the Sierra, and his children’s voices call to him from the garden where the sound of the rusted swing filtered into his sleep. They tell him it’s getting late, that the train to Madrid will come by very soon. He answers the telephone in the middle of the long hall in his apartment and the foreign voice saying his name is Judith Biely’s. He walks into the shade of the awning over the café next to the Europa movie house on Calle Bravo Murillo and pretends not to hear the voice behind him calling his name, the voice of his old teacher at the Weimar Bauhaus, Professor Rossman. He has no reason to avoid him but prefers not to see him; he doesn’t know that this September morning is the last time Professor Rossman will call him by name on a street in Madrid. His voice is lost in a choral explosion of martial anthems, accompanied by drums and cornets, which emerges from the open doors of the movie theater along with a breath of shade and the smell of disinfectant. But the voice repeats his name, as Professor Rossman pats him on the shoulder, my dear Professor Abel, what a surprise, I thought you’d be in America by now.

Auditory hallucinations (but the voice that spoke his name outside the locked door was not a dream: Ignacio, for the sake of all you love best, open the door, don’t let them kill me). Ignacio Abel tells himself that perhaps the human brain instinctively hears familiar voices in such situations so that the mind doesn’t lose its grip on reality. He heard them this summer in Madrid, at night in his darkened apartment, larger for not being inhabited since the beginning of July, most of the furniture and lamps draped in white cloths to protect them from dust; he didn’t bother to remove them. He thought he heard the radio at the back of the house, in the ironing room, and it took him several seconds to realize it wasn’t possible, or that his memory had manipulated the sound of another radio in the vicinity and transformed the echo of a recollection into a present sensation. He imagined he heard Miguel and Lita having an argument in their room, or that Adela had just come in and the door slammed behind her. The brevity of the deception made it more intense, as did its unexpected occurrence. At any time, particularly when he abandons himself to restless sleep, the voice of Judith Biely would whisper his name so close to his ear he could feel the brush of her breath. In Paris, on his first morning away from Spain, the unexpected voices combined with the fleeting hallucinations. He would see a figure in the distance, the silhouette of someone on the other side of a café window, and for a second he was sure it was someone he knew in Madrid. His children, about whom he’d heard nothing, played soccer on a sandy path in the Luxembourg Gardens; the day before starting out on his journey, he went to say goodbye to José Moreno Villa, alone and looking older in a tiny office in the National Palace, bending over an old file — and yet now he saw him walking a few paces ahead on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, erect, younger, wearing one of his favorite English wool suits and a felt hat tilted slightly to the side. A second later the illusion disappeared as he came closer to the person who’d inspired it, and Ignacio Abel found it difficult to understand how the deception had been possible: the children playing in the Luxembourg were older than his and in no way resembled them; the man identical to Moreno Villa had a dull face, eyes lacking intelligence, and a suit of mediocre cut. Through the small round window of a restaurant kitchen he saw, and for an instant was paralyzed by, the face of one of the three men who’d come to search his house on one of the last nights in July.

But the experience of the deception didn’t make him more cautious. Not long afterward, he again saw in the distance, at a café table or on a station platform, an acquaintance from Madrid, someone he knew was dead. At first the faces of the dead are imprinted deep in one’s memory and return in dreams and daytime hallucinations shortly before they fade into nothingness. The bald oval head of Professor Karl Ludwig Rossman, whom he had seen and recognized with difficulty one night early in September at the morgue in Madrid under the funereal light of a bulb hanging from a cord where flies clustered, fleetingly appeared to him one day among the passengers sitting in the weak October sun on the deck of the ship he’d taken to New York: an older bald man, probably a Jew, lying on a canvas hammock, his mouth open, his head twisted to one side, sleeping. The dead look as if they’ve fallen asleep in a strange position, or were laughing in their dreams, or death came without waking them, or they opened their eyes and were already dead, one eye wide, the other half closed, one eye blackened or turned to pulp by a bullet. Sudden memories are projected in the present before him like photograms inserted by mistake in the montage of a film, and though he knows they’re false, he has no way to dispel them and avoid their promise and their poison. Walking along the boulevard that led to the port of Saint-Nazaire — at the end of a perspective of horse chestnut trees rose the curved steel wall of an ocean liner, where a name recently painted in white letters, SS MANHATTAN, gleamed in the sun — he saw a man with a broad face and black hair, dressed in a light-colored suit, sitting in the sun at a café table: through a trick of memory, he saw García Lorca again on a June morning on the Paseo de Recoletos in Madrid, from the taxi in which he was rushing to one of his secret meetings with Judith Biely. One of the last. Distance enlivened the details of memory with the immediacy of physical sensations — the June heat inside the taxi, the worn-leather smell of the seat. Lorca, his legs crossed, smoking a cigarette at a marble-topped table, and for a moment Ignacio Abel thought he’d seen and recognized him. Then the taxi circled Cibeles and drove very slowly up Calle de Alcalá, where traffic had stopped, perhaps for a funeral procession, as there were armed guards at the corners. He looked at his wristwatch and the clock on the Post Office Building; he calculated each minute of his time with Judith that was stolen from him by the slow-moving taxi, the crowd gathered for the funeral with flags, placards, and the convulsive gestures of political mourning. Now he thinks of García Lorca dead and imagines him in the same light-colored summer suit he wore that morning, the same tie and two-toned shoes, dead and curled up like a street urchin in that posture of preparing for sleep displayed by the bodies of some who have been shot, lying on their side with their legs pulled up, face resting on a partially extended arm, sleepers tossed into a ditch or near an adobe wall riddled with bullet holes, spattered with blood.

The same haste he felt then propels him forward now toward the unknown, Rhineberg, a place that is only a name, a hill overlooking a river of maritime width, a nonexistent library that at this stage of the journey is nothing more than a series of pencil sketches and an excuse for his flight. The haste that carried him to his obligations, driving his small car at top speed through Madrid, that made him wake at night, impatient for dawn, distressed at time’s passage, the irreparable waste of time imposed by Spanish ineptitude, indifference, and that age-old sullen resistance to any kind of change. Now the haste endures, stripped of its purpose, like the phantom pain that continues to afflict someone who’s had an amputation, like the reflexive impulse that carries him to an immediate destiny where he won’t find Judith Biely and beyond which he can see nothing: the voices dreamed and real, the minute hand that abruptly advances on all the clocks in Pennsylvania Station, a staircase with metal steps descending into the echoing underground vault where the trains depart, his suitcase in his hand, his knuckles aching, his passport in the inside pocket, touched for a second by the hand that holds his ticket, a conductor who nods as he shouts the name of his destination, a voice drowned by the vibration of the electric locomotive as beautiful as the nose of an airplane, ready to leave with merciless punctuality, roaring like the machinery and sirens of the SS Manhattan as it moved slowly away from the pier. Occasionally his haste lessens, but its urgent pang is not erased. The only letup is the moment of departure, the absolution of a few hours or days when you can abandon yourself without remorse to the passivity of the journey, or lie down and close your eyes in a hotel room without taking your shoes off, lie down on your side, your legs drawn up, wanting not to think about anything, not to have to open your eyes again. Soon that period of time will be over, the uneasiness will return: the suitcase has to be packed again or taken down from the luggage net, documents have to be prepared to make sure nothing is left behind. But for now, having just entered the train and taking his seat, Ignacio Abel leans with infinite relief against the window, at least for the next two hours protected and safe. He has placed the suitcase on the seat beside him, and without removing his raincoat touches all his pockets one by one, his fingertips identifying surfaces, textures, the cover and flexibility of his passport, the bulk of his wallet with the photos of Judith Biely and his children and the few dollars he has left, the telegram he will take out soon to reconfirm his travel instructions, the envelope with Adela’s letter, packed with sheets of paper he perhaps should have torn up before leaving the hotel room or simply left behind, forgotten, on the night table. There is something he doesn’t recognize right away, a fine cardboard edge in his right jacket pocket: it’s the postcard of the Empire State Building with a zeppelin moored to the top, which he forgot to slip into one of the letterboxes at the station, each bearing the name of a country in gold letters. He notices now, as he crosses his legs, how dirty and cracked his shoes are, the soles still carrying dust from the streets of Madrid, the hand-sewn soles that are wearing out, just like the crease in his trousers, and his shirt cuffs. The most interesting part of a construction begins when it is finished, said the smiling engineer Torroja, the man responsible for reviewing the structural calculations for the buildings at University City and who had designed a bridge with tall narrow arches like those in a canvas by Giorgio de Chirico. The action of time, the pull of gravity, the forces that continue to interact among themselves in the precarious equilibrium generally called stability or firmness, which in reality has no more substance than a house of cards and sooner or later will succumb to its own internal laws — Torroja would say, aiding the enumeration with his fingers, or a natural catastrophe, a flood or an earthquake, or the human enthusiasm for destruction. The door at the rear of the car opens and a young blond woman appears, slim, hatless, looking for someone, an expression of urgency on her face, as if she had to get off the train before it started moving in less than a minute. For a moment, barely the lapse between two heartbeats, Abel recognizes Judith Biely, re-creates with the precision of a drawing what he didn’t know had remained intact in his memory, what exists and is erased without a trace in the presence of an unknown woman who doesn’t resemble her at all: the oval of her face, her eyebrows, her lips, her curly hair, a light chestnut color, the red nail polish, her broad shoulders, like those of a swimmer or a mannequin in a display window.