In the Night of Time

11

WHEN HIS CHILDREN were small, Ignacio Abel liked to make for them drawings and models, cutouts of houses, automobiles, animals, trees, ships. He’d begin by drawing a tiny dog in his sketchbook, and next to the dog a street lamp would emerge like a tall flower, and near it a window, and from there the entire house would take shape, and above the roof and chimney, beside which a cat was outlined, the moon appeared like a slice of melon. Lita and Miguel would look at those prodigious creations, their elbows on the table, leaning so close to the sketchbook they barely left him room to continue drawing, competing for a proximity they rarely enjoyed. They lived in their shared bedroom that was also their homework room and playroom, and in the back rooms where the maids reigned, not observing the severe norms of silence or things said in quiet voices that the children had to submit to when entering adult territory: in the kitchen, in the laundry room, where Miguel spent all his spare time, the maids talked loudly and the radio played all day long, and through the window overlooking an interior courtyard came the voices of the servants in other residences as they called to one another, slurring their speech in an accent Miguel imitated perfectly. In the rest of the house the children had to close and open doors gently, walk without making noise, especially near their father’s study or the bedroom with closed curtains where their mother often had to withdraw because of endless headaches or ailments that rarely had a precise name or were serious enough to require the doctor’s presence. In the kitchen the maids’ voices and those on the radio fused with the splatters and smoke emanating from the stoves, and colorful characters would appear at the service door, delivery men from the stores, peddlers loaded down with cheeses, pots of honey, sometimes chickens or rabbits, heads down and feet tied. But the door separating the service area from the rest of the apartment had to be kept closed, and the children, above all Miguel, who had a more confused idea of his place in the world, were fascinated by this rigorous frontier that only they moved across freely. Not only faces and sounds changed but accents and odors, the odors of things and of people: on one side it smelled of oil, food, fish, the blood of a recently slaughtered chicken or rabbit, the maids’ sweat; on the other side it smelled of the lavender soap their mother used to wash her hands, their father’s cologne, furniture polish, the cigarettes visitors sometimes smoked.

As she grew older, the girl ventured across the frontier less and less frequently, for the most part in order to remain true to the character of a distinguished intellectual señorita she’d invented for herself, and instead of flamenco verses about jealousy and crimes and great black eyes playing on the kitchen radio, Lita listened with her mother to symphonic broadcasts on Unión Radio. While Miguel, enthralled, read about film stars and advertisements for exorcisms and astrological remedies in the cheap magazines the maids bought (LOVE and LUCK are yours FREE OF CHARGE if you possess the mysterious RADIATING FLOWER prepared in accordance with the millenarian rites of PAMIR and the immutable astrological principles of the MAGI OF THE ORIENT), Lita read novels by Jules Verne, knowing she’d earn her father’s approval, and interpreted for the family the popular ballads she learned to sing at school. But both had felt attracted to their father’s study, whose mysterious spaces their childish imaginations had enlarged. He was fast and sure with the pencil, as absorbed as his children in what he was doing. He would shade the outlines of the drawing and add the form of a foldable base, then cut everything out, house, tree, balloon, animal, automobile with its convertible top and headlights, the radii of the wheels perfectly detailed, even the profile of a chauffeur in a visored cap at the wheel, a Western outlaw on horseback, a motorcycle with the driver leaning forward, wearing a leather jacket and aviator goggles. Once he drew an airplane, and when he finished cutting it from the sketchbook, flew it between his fingers above the heads of the children, each desperate to hold it first. In stationery stores he looked for cutouts of famous buildings, bridges, trains, ocean liners; he taught them to handle scissors, in which their pudgy child’s fingers became entangled, to follow with cautious precision the edges of a drawing, to distinguish between cutting and folding lines, to gently squeeze the bottle of glue so that only the small drop that was needed came out. And when they became impatient or gave up, he’d take the scissors and show them again how to cut out a drawing, recalling Professor Rossman, his teacher in Weimar, who would go into a comic ecstasy when he heard the sound and observed the resistance of the sheet of paper he was cutting.

He brought them old models from the office, drew cutouts of buildings he’d studied in international magazines. When they were older, perhaps they’d remember that as children they played with models of the Bauhaus in Dessau and Erich Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower, which they liked more because it resembled a lighthouse and a castle tower. But it wasn’t that Ignacio Abel condescended to entertain his children or showed them praiseworthy patience. His own love of architecture had a portion of self-absorbed childish play. He liked to cut and fold. The flexible angles of an empty pillbox gave him immediate tactile pleasure, pure forms as perceptible with one’s fingertips as with one’s eyes: angles, stairways, corners. How strange the invention of the staircase, a concept of something so remote from any inspiration in nature, space folding over itself at right angles, a single broken line on blank paper, as limitless in principle as a spiral, or those parallel lines whose definition had overwhelmed him at school: “No matter how far they extend, they will never meet.” So close one to the other, yet condemned never to meet by an unexplained curse. From his able hands, from the shadows of words and childish fears, an emotion receded to the bottom of time: as if advancing along a very long passage toward a faint light, he saw the boy he had been, sitting in a room with a low ceiling, bent over a notebook, wielding a cheap pen, dipping it into an inkwell, objects near him erased beyond the small circle of the oil lamp. The sun didn’t come in the basement window, but the sound of people’s footsteps did, and animals’ hooves, and wagon wheels, the permanent yelling of street vendors, the monotonous chant of blind men singing. One night hooves and wheels stopped at the window. Someone knocked at the door and he remembered that his mother had gone out and he had to go up and open the street door. In the wagon was a shape covered with sacks.

He made a small building and told his children it was a house for fleas; next to it a tree, an automobile, a bridge a little farther away, its raised arch identical to the one in the Viaducto, or the one the engineer Torroja had designed to save the gully of a stream in University City; the marquee of a train station, its clock hanging from the beams, the tiny Roman numerals drawn inside the sphere with a pencil he’d sharpened to an extremely fine point. With the same joy he studied the scale model of University City that had been growing in one of the drafting rooms at his office, a replica of the space visible through the windows, at first not a blank page but a wasteland of bare earth covered with the stumps of thousands of pines. Like Gulliver in Lilliput he supervised a diminutive city where his footsteps would have reverberated like seismic shocks, the city that had begun as cardboard and ink, glue, blocks of wood, the faithful model of a fragment of the world that was three-dimensional but didn’t exist yet or was being created slowly, too slowly. On the other side of the windows, steam shovels opened great trenches in the barren earth, lifting roots like manes of hair, like naked branches of trees that would have grown in the subsoil (to build, one first had to clear away and cut down, clean out and flatten, make the earth as smooth and abstract as a sheet of paper spread on a drawing table). Laborers swarmed along the esplanades, on the embankments; with agility they climbed the scaffolding of buildings under construction, thronged in corridors and future lecture halls, applying cement, installing tiles, completing a row of bricks, beginning another; monarchs of their trades, experts in giving real form to what began as capricious fantasy in a sketchbook, copper-colored men in berets with cigarettes glued to their lips; powerful dump trucks and droves of donkeys that transported loads of plaster or jugs of water in their panniers; armed guards who patrolled the construction sites to chase away the crowds of laid-off workers who demanded jobs or tried to overturn or burn the machines that had replaced them and condemned them to starvation. Primitives and millenarians, like them, deluded now not by the expectation of the End of Days but by Libertarian Communism. With a slight effort of his rational imagination, Ignacio Abel could see the completed buildings when bricklayers were still hard at work on their scaffolding and cranes with electric motors swayed over them: beautiful blocks of red brick shining in the sun, along with the exact visual rhythm of the windows, against the dark green background of the Sierra’s spurs. He saw avenues with large trees that now were little more than weak shoots or not even that, cardboard trees he’d cut out himself and glued to the sidewalk of a model. The School of Philosophy students crossed felled trees to reach their building, inaugurated in a rush (in the lecture halls one could still hear the workers’ shouts and pounding hammers). He imagined the students arriving in high-speed streetcars along the straight, wide avenues, strolling in the shade of the trees, lindens or oaks, dispersed on the grass that would grow someday on that bare ground: young, well-fed men and women with strong bones, children of privilege but also workers’ children, educated in solid public schools where knowledge wouldn’t be corrupted by religion and merit would prevail over family background and money. He preferred the vigor of sap to boiling Spanish blood, botany to politics, irrigation projects to five-year plans. Running water, electric streetcars, trees with broad, dense foliage, ventilated spaces. “Abel, for you the social revolution is a question of public works and gardening,” Negrín once said to him, and he replied, “And it’s not for you, Don Juan?” He could almost see his daughter, in a few years’ time, destined for the School of Philosophy and Letters, good-natured and mature, jumping off the streetcar, books under her arm, her hair under a beret slanted to one side, her raincoat open, still an uncommon sight among groups of male students. The future wasn’t a fog of the unknown or a projection of senseless desires, not the predictions of cards or lines on one’s hand, not preachers’ sinister prophecies of the end of the world or paradise on earth. The future was foreseen in the blue lines on plans and in the models he’d helped to build, seeing something in a single glance, understanding with one’s eyes, guessing at a form with the touch of one’s fingers. Ignacio Abel loved the blocks of wood in his children’s building sets, the typography in the books of Juan Ramón Jiménez, the poetry of right angles in Le Corbusier. The flat outskirts of Madrid were a clear drawing table on which the future city could be laid out beyond the plans for the university. Straight perspectives that would dissolve in the horizon of the Sierra, vanishing lines of streetcar tracks and electric cables, the workers’ district and its white houses with large windows surrounded by plazas and gardens. To the same extent that he distrusted the vagueness of words, he loved concrete acts and tangible, well-made constructions. A school with bright, comfortable classrooms, a spacious playground, a well-equipped gymnasium; a bridge built with solidity and beauty; a rationally conceived house with running water and a bathroom — he could not imagine more practical ways of improving the world.

He had accomplished things that could be measured and judged, that had an undeniable lasting presence in reality. How unsettling the thought that time would run out, that he wouldn’t have the intellectual clarity or presence of mind or courage to carry out what he dreamed of: a house where he and Judith Biely would live both in the world and separate and safe from it, a library in a clearing in the woods beside a great river. The tiny human figures he’d placed on the model to give an idea of scale — he saw them as animated and enlarged to the size of adults, young men and women carrying books, his own children. He was impatient for that future to arrive sooner. He’d heard Juan Ramón Jiménez speak of an unhurried hurry, of joyful work. He wanted to see them concluded: the University Hospital, the School of Medicine, the School of Sciences, the School of Architecture (so close to completion); he wanted that open ground with trenches like scars and harsh brambles to be an athletic field; he wanted the sticks of trees to grow and give more shade to the barren land of Madrid (other trees had been cut down earlier, other walls demolished by pickaxes and steam shovels, but in a short time the wounds in the landscape would heal, and what existed before would be forgotten). How painful the slowness of the work, what impatience with administrative procedures, with the dilatoriness of the human effort required for any task, even more so with such primitive methods of construction. Picks, hoes, shovels scratching at the hard earth of Castilla, malnourished laborers in filthy berets, with ruined mouths from which hand-rolled cigarettes hung. Early on Monday the work would start up with a show of energy, and a week later all was left hanging because of a government crisis or because another construction strike had been called.

Sometimes he thought: you could have been one of them, your son could have been born to earn a scant wage as a bricklayer in University City or to throw rocks at the mounted guards and not study for a career. (What would Miguel study? What would he be suited for?) As a boy he’d worked with his hands during school vacations with the crews under his father, the foreman respected by his bricklayers because even if he’d prospered enough to wear a vest and jacket, he still had a face burned by weather and blunt, hard hands, and was more skilled than anyone in tracing the line of a wall with squinting eyes and no more help than a cord and a lead weight. Accompanying his father as a boy, he’d learned the physical effort demanded by each shovelful of cement and moved earth, each paving stone in its precise place, each brick in its identical row. Everything was easy, dazzling on the plan: the lines of ink and patches of watercolor culminated in a building in a couple of afternoons of joyful work, an entire city invented in a few days. Avenues crossing at right angles, receding to the vanishing point; trees in the tender greens of watercolor; small human figures to indicate scale. But in reality the figure seen through the windows of the drafting room is a man who tires easily and isn’t well fed; who left his wretched living quarters in an outlying suburb before dawn to walk to work and save the few céntimos a streetcar or the metro would have cost; who at midday eats a poor stew of garbanzos boiled in a broth made from an old bone; who could fall from a scaffolding or be crushed by an avalanche of bricks or stones and become an invalid and spend the rest of his life lying on a straw mattress in a room at the end of a foul-smelling hall while his wife and children go hungry and find themselves condemned to the humiliation of public charity. When he inspected a construction site, passively observing the physical effort of other men, Ignacio Abel became uncomfortably aware of his well-cut suit, his body fresh from his morning shower and absolved from the brutality of labor, his shoes dirtied by dust, the shoes the bricklayer bent over in a trench would see at eye level when he passed: gentlemen’s shoes, so insulting to the man who wears espadrilles. “You don’t understand the class struggle, Don Ignacio,” Eutimio had told him, the foreman who forty years earlier had been an apprentice on his father’s crew. “Class struggle is when a few drops of rain fall and your feet get wet.” He felt shame and relief, wished for social justice, and feared the rage of those hoping to make it happen through the violence of a bloody revolution. How many men had died in the Asturias uprising, how many suffered torture and prison? For what? In the name of what apocalyptic prophecies translated into the language of tabloids, at the hands of such brutal uniformed avengers, drunk on other degraded words, or not even that, mercenaries paid as miserably as the rebels they hunted down. He feared that cruelty or misfortune would crush his children, dragging them into the penury from which he’d escaped but that was still so close, like a certain, visible threat: in the scabby, barefoot children who circled the site looking for something to steal or approached the workers to beg for something to eat, who walked with their heads down, holding the hand of a father who’d been laid off. He wanted his children to become strong, to learn something about the harshness of real life, particularly the boy, so weak and vulnerable, but he also wanted to protect them beyond any uncertainty, save them forever from evil and sorrow. Sometimes he took the children to the office, especially after he’d bought the car. He took them for rides along the future avenues, pointed out the places where perhaps they would study. He’d accelerate so the wind would hit them in the face, drive to the dusty green of the Monte del Pardo, then return to University City. Their mother had dressed them as if they were going to a baptism: the boy with straight bangs across his forehead, his small man’s jacket, his loose-fitting trousers; the girl’s hair arranged with a part and a ribbon, wearing patent leather shoes and socks. He’d continue working after the other employees had left and the children played like giants in the model of the city. At home, the maids were surprised to see the señor take care of the children while the señora attended her social gatherings, the lectures and expositions at the Lyceum Club, or spent the entire day in the darkened bedroom; surprised that he would go down on all fours with the children in the hallway, or move aside the papers on his worktable to make room for their constructions of paper and cardboard and their toy car races.

It hadn’t always been this way. For a long time he wished they hadn’t been born, during anguished nights of crying and fever when he felt suffocated under the weight of his responsibility. He went far away, but with distance guilt became sharper. In Weimar, each time he saw his wife’s handwriting on a letter he was afraid he would find out that one of them was sick (surely the boy, not only younger but more fragile). At times he’d walk along the street enjoying the silence after a day of hard work and study and suddenly have the presentiment that when he reached the pensión the landlady would hand him an urgent telegram. He feared misfortune, and punishment even more. For having gone away, for not feeling homesick. For surrendering to the embrace of his Hungarian lover, who, when they had finished, pushed him away, lit a cigarette, and seemed to forget his existence. For having applied for the study grant without consulting Adela and putting off the moment of telling her in the cowardly hope he’d be turned down, avoiding both the need for courage and the certain melodrama. He was afraid of telegrams, unexpected phone calls, knocks on the door, the signs that he’d soon learn something that would ruin everything.

The wagon with wooden wheels and iron reinforcements had stopped at the low window of the porter’s lodging, and the hooves of a horse had struck the paving stones, but he didn’t look up from the notebook where he was copying an exercise in geometrical drawing, going over in ink the lines he’d previously drawn in pencil (two parallel lines, regardless of how far they extend, never meet), wetting just the tip of the nib in the inkwell to avoid the error of a blot on the white paper. It was another time, almost another century, and he was thirteen years old in the winter of 1903. (The king had been crowned a few months earlier. Ignacio Abel had seen him go by in a carriage surrounded by golden shakos with crests of feathers and noticed that he wasn’t much older than himself: the king had the long, pale face of a boy beneath the visor of his high military shako.) There was knocking at the entrance door and he didn’t look up because his mother was the one who took care of the porter’s lodging. There was more knocking, louder this time, and then he remembered that his mother had gone out, telling him to look after things. A stranger wearing a beret and a bricklayer’s smock asked for her and looked at him when he said she wasn’t in, and he was her son. He was still holding the pen with the wooden shaft when he approached the wagon where the shape covered in empty plaster sacks lay. Wagon wheels will leave two parallel lines that will never meet as they carry on bare boards that bounce over potholes a dead body covered with a sack. His father, always so agile, so impatient with his son who had vertigo when he climbed a foot or two, had broken his neck falling from a scaffold. After many years Ignacio Abel still sometimes dreamed he had to move aside the cloth of the dusty sack with the large, dark stain to see the face underneath. In the soft palm of his child’s hand the shaft of the pen broke in two, a sharp splinter piercing his sweaty skin. His guilt as a father mixed with his fear of misfortune. Vertigo in the face of those fragile lives to whom he was tied by an overwhelming responsibility was revived by his retrospective compassion for the boy who had bent his head over a notebook in that poorly lit room moments before the knocking at the door, ignorant of the fact that he was now the only child of a widowed mother, an exemplary student at the neighborhood Piarist school, rescued from a sentence to manual labor thanks not only to his intelligence but to the money his father had saved for so many years, knowing he wasn’t well, knowing he’d leave a defenseless child too delicate to earn his living as he’d done. He had been ill. When he fell from the top of the scaffolding, it wasn’t because he tripped or because of a loose board but because his heart burst.

Slowly, Ignacio Abel had been coming to terms with the presence of his two children and discovered, as time went on, that they were the most luminous part of his life. Watching them grow taught him to mistrust disappointment and be thankful for the unexpected. What real life imposed on his desire and the project were not only limitations but also possibilities, the gifts of risk and the unforeseen. The anonymous masters of architecture had worked with what they had closest to hand, not with materials they’d selected but with those provided by chance, stone or wood or clay for adobe bricks. His father would touch a dressed stone of granite with his large open palm as if he were stroking an animal’s back. There was discipline, a pride in the struggle to execute a project exactly according to plan. In 1929 he’d traveled to Barcelona expressly to see the German pavilion at the International Exposition, and as he studied with Professor Rossman the rooms of marble and steel and glass walls, he’d discovered in himself, beneath the admiration, an element of rejection. The perfection that only a few years earlier would have seemed indisputable disturbed him now for its coldness, over which it seemed the human presence would slide without leaving a trace. He loved the reinforced concrete, the extensive sheets of glass, the firm, flexible steel, but he envied the talent and skill when he saw at the side of a road a melon patch with a watchman’s shack made of straw and reeds, woven with an art that had existed four thousand years ago in the salt marshes of Mesopotamia, or a simple wall built with stones of different sizes and shapes that fit solidly together with no need for mortar. There was no plan so perfect that uncertainty could be discarded. Only the test of time and the elements revealed the beauty of a construction, ennobled by weather and worn by the movement of human lives, just as a tool handle was worn by use, or the treads of a staircase. And if the fulfillment of what he’d desired when he was very young resulted in disappointment and wariness over the years, the best he had was the consequence of the unexpected: the Hungarian woman who pressed her flat belly and meager hips against him in an unheated room in Weimar; Judith Biely; Lita and Miguel, who perhaps are forgetting his face and the sound of his voice or think he’s dead and are beginning to erase him from their lives, strengthened by a will to survive despite his absence.

No sign warned him of the appearance of Judith Biely. He’d never dreamed of or wished for children, who arrived by chance in the inertia of his marriage. No project, no fulfilled desire, not even those that without much hope inspired him at the age of thirteen or fourteen in the porter’s lodging (his schoolbooks and notebooks on the oilcloth-covered table with the built-in foot warmer, the inkwell and pencils, the oil lamp always lit in the damp basement apartment, the photograph of his dead father on the fireplace mantel, a black ribbon at a corner of the frame), had offered him as much happiness as watching his daughter grow, an unexpected masterpiece in which he could take pleasure with no hint of vanity or fear of disappointment. She lived in a self-determined, autonomous way, born of parents but independent of them, with a vague family resemblance — her hair identical to that of the Ponce-Cañizares clan, her rounded nose as unquestionably Salcedo as the hazel color of her eyes. From whom had she inherited her serenity, her consideration of people over and above the familial or the social, her equable instinct, her balance between a sense of duty and a disposition for joy? She’d inherited none of that from him, of course, or from Adela or her family, whom she nonetheless adored, especially her grandfather Don Francisco de Asís. As a little girl she’d been protective of her brother, tender with him, perhaps because the boy was younger and rather frail. Adela was frequently ill after Miguel’s birth. The wet nurse fed him and kept him clean, the maids hovered over him, but it was his sister who from the start concerned herself with caring for him, teaching him to play, urging him to walk, guessing his desires, understanding his language. She cared for her brother with the same satisfaction she took in jumping rope or cutting out a childish figure or arranging the furniture in her dollhouse. When he was a baby she’d take him in her arms, pressing him firmly against her and placing her hand at the back of his neck to protect his tender head. She cradled him, pressing her chubby cheeks against the boy’s pale little face, kissing him with a spontaneity her parents lacked. From early on, the boy admired her, and was as unconditional in his love as a dog to his owner, from whom he expects all good things and to whom he attributes all powers. It was she who helped him take his first steps and wiped away his tears and snot every time he fell. She played school and sat her brother in a low chair, in the same row as the dolls to whom she gave sums to do, or dictations, writing with chalk in her neat round hand on a blackboard the Three Kings had brought for her. The boy grew up adoring her, imitating her, so close to her in age and at the same time small and docile enough to obey her and learn from her. But he didn’t learn her social skills, her capacity for making friends and establishing intense relationships, as rich in embraces and promises of eternal friendship as in dramatic fights and reconciliations.

When they were small, Ignacio Abel had looked at his children with distraction and alarm, too impatient to pay much attention to them. He became more interested when they began to speak. The most lasting memories he had of their early years arose from the terror their illnesses caused in him. Attacks of fever in the middle of the night, endless fierce crying, blood spurting from a nose with no way to stop it, incessant diarrhea, the cough that seemed to calm down after several hours and then started again, so deep it seemed to be tearing apart their small lungs. He vaguely imagined that Adela or the wet nurse or the maids must have had some way of controlling the danger, must have known how to provide remedies or decide when it was time to call the doctor. He felt awkward and annoyed, sick with fear and consumed with irritation. The boy had been weak since birth, following an extremely long labor when it seemed Adela or he or both would die. When the midwife came out of the bedroom she placed the baby in his arms, tiny and red, his hands so small, so wrinkled, his fingers as fine as a mouse’s, his legs and feet tiny; his purple flaccid skin, too loose for his newborn’s bones, seemed covered with scales. “He’s very small, but even if he doesn’t look it, he’s very healthy,” said the midwife as she wrapped a woolen shawl around the form who weighed almost nothing, who seemed not to breathe, who moved in an abrupt spasm. Adela spent weeks in a feverish and delirious state, and when it seemed she was recovering, it was only to succumb to a lassitude not even the boy’s helpless presence could drive away. Wet nurse, servant girls, midwives, and doctors were summoned at all hours. Don Francisco de Asís and Doña Cecilia, the maiden aunts, the uncle who was a priest, all invaded the house that was much smaller than the future apartment on Calle Príncipe de Vergara, roused to relentless activity, boiling pots of water, preparing baby bottles, diapers, medicines, damp compresses for Adela’s fever, household remedies for the boy’s diarrhea, as constant as his inconsolable crying, reciting the rosary and prayers for women who have given birth, the primitive incantations of old women. Ignacio Abel spent the nights lying awake beside his silent, prostrate wife, and early in the morning, relieved, exhausted, left for work. He’d applied to the Council for Advanced Studies for a grant to spend a year in Germany, at the new School of Architecture founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar. He reviewed over and over the documents he’d presented at the Ministry of Education, calculating the possibility of receiving the official letter that would notify him of the grant. The boy would get better; the girl was almost three years old and had always been strong and healthy. In disbelief, he imagined himself taking a train at the North Station, leaning against the cold window as dawn broke over a landscape of green fields and gray mist while the train advanced along a wide river. He practiced German, trying to remember what he’d learned during his university studies. He read German books, looking up difficult words in the dictionary. He prepared in secret for something he wasn’t sure would happen; he wasn’t even sure he’d find the courage if the time came. Why had he supported Adela’s eagerness to become pregnant, then to have another child, frightened because she was no longer young, because she was uncertain of keeping her husband? More than a minute had gone by and the boy wasn’t crying; if he closed his eyes, perhaps he could sleep one or two uninterrupted hours tonight. But the crying returned, ever more relentless, with a muscular vigor that didn’t seem possible in an infant who had weighed less than two and a half kilos at birth. Very small but very healthy, the midwife had said, perhaps to deceive him. “We’ll have to baptize him right away,” said Don Francisco de Asís, putting his hands on the shoulders of his afflicted son-in-law, emerging from the dark corner where aunts and relatives recited the rosary in anticipation of the imminent misfortune. One night the uncle who was a priest appeared in full liturgical dress, accompanied by an altar boy, and the odor of incense mixed with the smell of medicine and the baby’s diarrhea. “It’s difficult to accept, my son, but if this angel leaves us, we must be certain he’ll go straight to heaven.” They brought holy water, a silver basin, embroidered cloths, candles on which the name of the boy was written. Not consulting him, and probably not Adela either — she was in a daze, her eyes lost on the wall opposite the bed — the maiden aunts helped the wet nurse dress the tiny baby in a long gown with blue ribbons and embroidered skirts in which his body disappeared, his chest swelling the cloth, his legs like matchsticks kicking beneath the skirts, his diminutive purple feet with the dry patches no cream could alleviate. Doña Cecilia, the maiden aunts, the wet nurse, and the weeping maids had put on veils as if for a funeral, and Uncle Víctor stood erect in his position as godfather, though his dislike of the boy’s weakness and crying was evident, as was his conviction that the feeble blood of the paternal line had prevailed. The boy, the first grandson, had come into the world sickly and crying, more proof of how untrustworthy the intruder was, the external inseminator, as suspect in his male capabilities as in his ideas. “Courage, brother-in-law, the kid will come out of this. In our family there hasn’t been a single case of premature death.”

In the midst of that upheaval only the girl seemed to remain calm, going from room to room, her pacifier in her mouth, observing the maid as she cleaned the baby’s bottom and washed the diapers under the tap in the kitchen, watching the wet nurse when she brought the small red face to her large, swollen white breast, the translucent skin crossed with blue veins, the enormous dark nipples, the broad hands that caressed the baby’s sweaty, flattened hair and delicately put the mouth at her nipple from which surged a rich, white thread of milk. The girl went down the long hallway and stole into the bedroom where her mother lay. She sat next to her on the edge of the bed, caressed her hands or smoothed her hair, damp with sweat, uncombed, dirty after so many days of convalescence. She seemed not to think it strange that her mother didn’t respond to her gestures of affection or give any sign she was aware of her presence. They put a white veil on the girl and had her hold a candle at her brother’s baptism, and she stood on tiptoe to watch as the priest poured water on the baby’s head and then dried it lightly with an embroidered handkerchief on which he also wiped his fingertips. That night, when her brother cried, she went to him and, instead of rocking the cradle, took his hand, and the baby calmed. From then on, the girl slept with the cradle beside her bed. When she heard the beginning of a whimper in the dark, her hand would feel its way between the bars. The boy’s tiny hand would close around his sister’s thumb, and, feeling safe, he went back to sleep. Meanwhile, awake in his bedroom, Ignacio Abel counted the seconds of silence, fearing that before he reached a minute the crying would start again. He could imagine himself dozing on a long train journey at night, autonomous and alone in a European city, as clearly as if that future were part of a memory, the way he saw himself as a boy, elbows propped on a table, in front of his notebook, the pen drawing two parallel lines on the blank page a moment before the knocking sounded on the door, in the light of the oil lamp that seemed to burn forever at the heart of time.