In the Night of Time

14

THERE WERE SIGNS but he didn’t see them, or rather, chose not to see them. Just a few steps removed from Judith Biely’s presence, from the fleeting time he spent with her, reality became as blurred as the background of a photograph. He is amazed at his confusion: so far from Madrid and from her, stripped of the drama of all he’d taken for granted, believed was his, now dissolved like salt in water, Ignacio Abel insists on sizing up the past, an exercise as useless for alleviating remorse as for correcting mistakes. He would have liked to know the moment when the disaster became inevitable, when the monstrous began to seem normal, as invisible as the most ordinary acts in life, when the words that encouraged the crime, which no one took seriously because they were repeated and were nothing but words, turned into crimes, when the crimes became so routine they were now part of normal life. Today the army is the foundation and spine of the nation. When civil war breaks out, we won’t accept cowardly defeat by offering our neck to the enemy. There’s one moment and not another, a point of no return; a hand holding a pistol is raised and moves to the back of someone’s neck, and a few seconds go by before the shot is fired; even when the index finger begins to squeeze the trigger, the possibility of turning back is still there, if only for a second; over months or years, water gradually seeps into the roof of a building that no one repairs and it takes only an instant for it all to come to a head, a beam splits in half and the ceiling falls; in tenths of a second the flame that almost went out revives and sets fire to a curtain or a handful of papers that will feed the blaze that will destroy everything. In the period of transition from a capitalist to a socialist society the form of government will be a dictatorship of the proletariat. Things are always on the verge of not happening, or happening in another way; very slowly or very quickly they are carried out or drift toward paralysis, but there’s a moment, just one, when a remedy can be found, when what will be lost forever can still be saved, when the irruption of misfortune, the advent of the apocalypse, can be stopped. When the inflexible justice of the people is carried out, the exploiters and their followers will die with their shoes on. A man will leave his house one morning at the usual hour and his executioners will be waiting inside a car. He will pause in the doorway to adjust his gloves and hat as the men clutch their pistols with sweaty hands. The car window will open just enough to let the cigarette smoke out and then the signal will come. The men will get ready to shoot but a truck might suddenly drive by and disrupt the whole operation. The victim will get a chance to flee, a guard’s life will be spared.

During a raw spring of gales and rainstorms that decimated the recently flowering branches of chestnut trees and acacias and peppered the pavements with seeds like white elm petals, almost every day Professor Rossman sent Ignacio Abel newspaper clippings heavily underlined with pencils of different colors and punctuated with exclamation points and question marks: reports of shootings or assaults cut off in the middle by censors, delirious statements amplified by the size of the headlines and by the volume of loudspeakers booming at meetings above the fervor of the crowds in bullrings. When we take to the streets for the second time, let there be no talk of generosity and no blame if revolutionary excesses go to the extreme of not respecting lives. Professor Rossman went around Madrid, his briefcase full of newspapers in several languages and handbills with senseless proclamations picked up on the streets, obsessed by the magnitude of the collective madness, the lies of German or Italian or Soviet propaganda. The USSR is the bright watchtower that lights our way, a free people that suffers neither exploitation nor hunger, a liberated people, marching in the vanguard of the working masses. Professor Rossman realized that the very scale of the lies was overwhelming. In cafés he’d begin a conversation, try to explain international politics that no one understood or cared about. But he’d seen with his own eyes, he knew the lies firsthand, and yet no one believed his status as witness, no one asked him about what he’d seen first in Germany and then in the Soviet Union. They looked at him with disbelief, at the most with impatience or annoyance or suspicion. Ignacio Abel looked at the tray with the mail in the foyer when he came home from work and almost always found an envelope with Professor Rossman’s writing, often containing only a clipping of a small square lost among the columns of some Spanish or European newspaper, which no one but he would have noticed: a political assassination in a distant province, a gunfight between Socialist and Anarchist fishermen in the port of Málaga, an administrative measure taken against Jewish professors at a German university, an obscure statement by Stalin at the Komsomol Congress, an article about the Japanese infiltration of Manchuria, an article by Luis Araquistáin in the journal Claridad predicting the imminent fall of the bourgeois Republic in Spain and the inevitable advent of the dictatorship of the proletariat, a photo of the tiny king Victor Emmanuel III declaring himself emperor of Abyssinia before a backdrop of Roman splendor from a movie set. Sometimes the envelopes hadn’t been stamped: Professor Rossman preferred to deliver them in person to the porter’s office in Ignacio Abel’s building so his former student could see them without delay. Priests and nuns swarm over the surface of the country like flies in a village that smells of putrefaction. The banner of the Spanish right has as an essential tenet the restoration of Christian spirituality in the face of efforts — dominated by hidden international forces that correspond to the symbols of the hammer and sickle, the Masonic triangle, and the Judaic golden calf — to make society materialistic. Yet Professor Rossman restrained from phoning Ignacio Abel or going to his office or to his apartment when he met his daughter after German lessons. Armed with scissors and pencils, he hunched over the newspapers lying open on a café table, pushing his glasses up onto his bald head, and when he was finished, he stuffed everything into his large black briefcase and went out with pointless urgency to meet someone or visit one of the offices or embassies where he had applications pending, to sound the alarm about the state of the world while it was still possible to do something about it.

But who stops the fire when it has already started and flames climb the walls and heat shatters the windowpanes? Who can quench the fury of someone who has been injured or stop the spiraling casualties? Who will keep count or make the alphabetical list of names growing by the minute like the telephone directory of an immense city, the Spanish city of the dead still expanding — as the train moves north along the banks of the Hudson River and its wheels pound rhythmically on the rails — in the distant night of Madrid, in open country and in the ditches, on both fronts, though it is difficult to imagine and seems impossible, looking at the broad serenity of the river, the expanse of copper and gold in the woods on the other side of the window, that at this very moment darkness and crime are swooping down on an entire country where night fell several hours ago. On sinister summer nights in Madrid, Ignacio Abel waited in vain for sleep to come; from the dark bedroom he could hear bursts of gunfire and the engines of cars racing along the deserted streets, rebelling with belated and useless rage against the inevitable, against the fatalistic necessity of disaster. Humiliated by his own impotence, in his mind he insisted on altering the course of the past: he alone, debating with phantoms, changing his own actions and those of the people he knew and even of public figures, rising up against his own blindness and feeling ashamed of it too late, passionately contradicting someone he hadn’t wanted to argue with months earlier, someone he heard saying the same thing everybody said, that in reality nothing was going on and the situation wasn’t all that serious and not worth worrying about, or perhaps that something terrible would happen, though nobody knew what, but it was too late now to avoid it, and maybe it was better this way because a torrential rain is preferable to the oppressiveness of an imminent storm that doesn’t arrive and makes the air increasingly hard to breathe. You can’t stop the implacable March of History, they said — Now or Never; Not One Step Back; Revolution or Death; Crush the Bolshevik Hydra; Workers Will Give Birth with Blood and Pain to a Glorious New Spain; The Army Must Once Again Be the Backbone of the Nation. Posters with large red or black letters recently posted on walls; muscular arms, violent jaws, open hands, clenched fists; swastikas, fasces and arrows, sickles and hammers, eagles with outstretched wings; advertisements for brandy; bullfight posters; effigies of giants painted on huge canvases that covered building façades and proclaimed the coming of the revolution or the opening of a film about Andalusian bandits. The radio played political anthems and military marches ad nauseam, a flamenco-style, shrill voice singing “My Pony” or “Juan Simón’s Daughter,” and the hoarse proclamations of orators rebounding in a bullfight arena: Let us tear down everything to make room for the flowering of the liberating revolution! Let us destroy those who, by simply thinking about destroying us, have joined the struggle! From the blood of our martyrs who fall under the vicious bullets of Bolshevik assassins the vigorous seed of a new Spain will grow!

He lived like everyone else, bewildered and worried, suffering attacks of disgust and fear as well as tedium, trapped by his obligations and desires, with no time to look around, perhaps seeing some signs but not stopping to reflect on what they foretold. It’s the time for liquidations, and these must be total and absolute. What could he know or remedy if he saw nothing, if he hadn’t even been able to keep Adela from finding the small key in the lock of his desk drawer, if for several months he hadn’t seen her face change day after day, the tone of her voice, the way she looked at him. What might have been avoided couldn’t be remedied. Let no traitor hope for clemency, because there will be none, not for any of them. On March 12 at eight-thirty in the morning, the police escort José Gisbert looks at the Socialist professor Luis Jiménez de Asúa, whose life he’s just saved by throwing himself against the man to shield him from the bullets; before dying, a gush of blood bursting from his open mouth, Gisbert says with a kind of astonishment, as he clutches the lapels of the professor’s overcoat with both hands, “They killed me, Don Luis.” The already-dead were a minority compared to all those who would inevitably have to die. Second Lieutenant Reyes, a fifty-year-old Civil Guard about to retire, attends the parade for the Day of the Republic in civilian clothes and stands close to the presidential stand, when suddenly a few men he doesn’t know shoot him down and disappear in the crowd. No one can identify the killers. On the hot night of May 7, Captain José Faraudo, a well-known Republican and Socialist, goes out with his wife after supper for a stroll along Calle de Lista; at the corner of Alcántara some young men come up behind him and shoot him point-blank. An avalanche or landslide or earthquake, all obey their own dynamic laws. After a certain catastrophic point, a fire doesn’t cease until it has consumed the material that feeds it. Diminutive human figures gesticulate at the edges of its glare, throw water that evaporates before it reaches the flames or even enlivens them, shout as loud as they can, but the roar of the fire obliterates their voices. Captain Faraudo fell face-down on the ground, close to the illuminated window of the travel agency where Lita Abel and her brother looked every afternoon at the model of a Hamburg — New York ocean liner like the one they imagined would carry them to America early in the fall. Ignacio Abel first felt the sensation of physical alarm at words magnified by typography or amplified by microphones soon after his arrival in Germany in 1923; words written on posters and signs at demonstrations, filling entire squares with a deafening sound he’d never experienced before; words like weapons discharging, waking the roar of a crowd or silencing it, bursting above it with the metallic violence of enormous loudspeakers, multiplied and omnipresent on radios. When he left for Germany there were few radios in Spain, and those weren’t powerful. In Berlin and then in Weimar, his initial difficulty with the language and his ignorance of the country’s circumstances transformed political parades into spectacles of a threatening, primitive crudity: gales of flags, war-like anthems played by bands, millions of steps at a martial pace, crowds of veterans in old uniforms displaying the horrifying variety of their mutilations, and on a balcony, in the rear, almost invisible, a gesticulating doll who could barely be seen but whose shouts were exaggerated by loudspeakers above unmoving heads and then lost in the distance like the echoes of a distant battle. Thirteen years later, Ignacio Abel saw with horror his city and country inundated by that same flood. In the bullfight arena in Zaragoza, in the heat of a May noon, the feverish, hoarse voices of Anarchist orators proclaim the imminent approach of free love, the abolition of the state and of armies, and Libertarian Communism. In the bullfight arena in Madrid, in a vast eddy of red flags, before a huge portrait of Lenin, Don Francisco Largo Caballero, acclaimed by tens of thousands of throats as the Spanish Lenin, foresees, like an old apocalyptic prophet, the advent of the Union of Iberian Soviet Republics, the collectivization of land and factories, the annihilation of the bourgeoisie and man’s exploitation of man.

Alone in Madrid, dedicated to assignments that were, for the most part, illusory — during the first months of the war he still went almost every day to his office in University City, examining plans and documents that were worthless now, inspecting abandoned construction sites — he spent the summer withdrawn into a fearful silence. The rational words he would have liked to say in a serene voice, the sweet ordinary words of his previous life, no longer mattered. At times he spoke aloud just to hear a voice in his empty house, his abandoned office; he imagined he was talking to his children, to Adela; he told them about his strange, solitary life in Madrid, the changes on the street and in people’s clothing, the new attire that didn’t exist a short while ago and yet formed part of a hallucinatory normality. He imagined conversations with Judith Biely as futilely as he wrote her letters he didn’t know where to send and often didn’t put down on paper. Perhaps there was a word he didn’t say that might have prevented Judith’s leaving Madrid. Perhaps he came close to finding her on the night of July 19 and leaping with her onto a train or persuading her not to take it. Things are about to happen but don’t. The first flame is extinguished and doesn’t cause the fire. The man grasping the pistol in his pocket doesn’t take it out because of fear or nervousness, or because he thinks he sees someone who looks like the secret police watching him. His intended victim will walk past him and never know he was about to die. On Friday, July 10, Ignacio Abel finally gets in touch with Judith, after two weeks of not hearing from her. As they talk on the phone and she agrees to meet, Lieutenant José Castillo of the Assault Guard — slim, his hair combed straight back, round glasses, impeccable uniform, leather straps and boots gleaming — is sipping his coffee. At the end of the bar he sees some strangers who look suspicious and instinctively reaches for his pistol. He frequently receives anonymous letters and knows that at any moment he could be killed, just like his friend Captain Faraudo two months earlier, yet he still has the gallantry to go out alone and on foot to his quarters, crossing the center of Madrid. The strangers finish their coffee and leave. At the very last moment they were ordered to abort the attempt on Lieutenant Castillo’s life.

He found no excuses even for himself. Having lost what mattered to him most, and knowing that he, too, could become one of the murdered, gave him no right to innocence. When did he begin to lie without effort or remorse? When did he become accustomed to hearing shots and calculating their distance and danger without going to the window? When did he see a pistol up close for the first time, not in a film, not in the holster of a police officer, but in the hand of someone he knew, bulging in a pocket, the front of a jacket, a pistol or revolver shown with almost the same ease as a lighter or fountain pen. In May, in the Café Lion, a few days after the murder of Captain Faraudo, Dr. Juan Negrín searched the pockets of his jacket, too tight for his Herculean bulk, after summarily cleaning his fingers, stained by red juice from the prawns he’d been eating, and instead of the pack of cigarettes Ignacio Abel imagined, he took out a pistol and put it on the table, next to the plate of prawns and mugs of beer, an unlikely pistol, so small it looked like a toy. “Look what I have to carry,” he said, “and I can’t even be on the street by myself anymore,” and he pointed to the plainclothes policeman sitting alone at a table near the entrance, engrossed in sucking on a toothpick. In the gangster films he went to see with Judith Biely, pistols were objects with a lacquered shine that had a symbolic, almost immaterial quality, like lamps or flashlights, providing a bewitched immobility with their brightness, an abstract death without traces, not a hole or a tear or a stain in the close-fitting suit of the character who was shot, the silky evening dress of the beautiful but deceitful woman who deserved to die in the end. Gradually pistols were becoming real, without his paying attention, without his knowing how to notice them. He went to the Congress of Deputies to look for Negrín — he left, a secretary told him with a smile, he was dying of hunger and asked me to tell you he’s waiting for you at the Café Lion — and on the counter of the checkroom he saw a wooden box filled with pistols under a neatly hand-lettered sign: The honorable deputies are reminded that it is not permitted to carry firearms inside the parliamentary area. Leafing through a copy of Mundo Gráfico in the anteroom of the dressmaker where Adela and the girl were trying on outfits, he saw the advertisement for Astra pistols among those for skin creams and pills to regulate menstruation and increase the size of one’s breasts. Protect your possessions and the security of your loved ones.

In the photographs of the funeral of Second Lieutenant Reyes, murdered for unknown reasons during a disturbance in the crowd watching the military parade on the Day of the Republic, one can see that many of those accompanying the coffin, both military and civilian, carry unsheathed pistols. Although it’s April 16 and the leaves have come out on the trees along the Paseo de la Castellana, everyone is in dark winter clothing. From the scaffolding at a construction site, pistols and machine pistols are fired over the heads of the funeral procession, and people run in all directions, seeking shelter in gardens and behind trees, and for some minutes the coffin of Second Lieutenant Reyes is abandoned in the puddles on the pavement. When the funeral reaches the East Cemetery several hours later, it has left a trail of more than twenty corpses on the streets. “You shouldn’t be so confident, Don Ignacio. If you give me your authorization, I’ll arrange for a couple of comrades from the union to escort you when you inspect the sites.” Eutimio, the construction foreman at the Medical School, had come into Ignacio Abel’s office with his cap in hand and before speaking had closed the door. “A lot of maniacs are running loose, Don Ignacio. None of us is safe.” In the wind and rain, the crowd accompanying the funeral of Second Lieutenant Reyes goes up Calle de Alcalá, and when it reaches the Plaza de Manuel Becerra, a formation of Assault Guards armed with rifles bars the way. The shouts of “Long live” and “Death to” become more violent, as do the chanting of the rosary and the hymns. The crowd advances on the barrier of uniforms and the Assault Guards open fire at point-blank range. A slender, pale lieutenant with glasses and a close-fitting uniform pulls his pistol from its holster and fires into the chest of a young man with the look of a Fascist student who was advancing on him, his face red from singing a hymn. But there is a state of emergency and newspapers are censored, so the next day one can’t find a clear report of what happened or the number of casualties. Or the announcement of a funeral is published but no one understands it because it was censored a day before news of the killing was published. Besides, you’re in a hurry, you have no time and decide not to see what’s in front of your eyes. Perhaps you’re in a taxi, impatient to reach the appointment with your lover, and you pay no attention to the crowd in your way and aren’t curious to know whose funeral it is, only irritated because you’ll arrive late, because on account of that disturbance you’ll lose some of the precious minutes of your meeting with her. From the shadows of the bedroom in Madame Mathilde’s house, on the other side of the thicket, the closed shutters, the curtains, gunfire and panic at the end of the funeral of Second Lieutenant Reyes may have been a distant background noise for Ignacio Abel as he embraces Judith Biely, naked on a red quilt. You leave hurriedly at eight-thirty in the morning to go to work and don’t see that across the street a car is parked with its windows down despite the cold and wind, and don’t hear that the engine has just started, or when you do and look up, you see the barrels of the pistols ready to shoot. The police escort throws himself on Professor Jiménez de Asúa, wanting to push him out of the way of the bullets, and is shot instead and lies dying on the sidewalk as the killers flee on foot because the driver is clumsy or nervous and floods the engine. How long did it take Adela, not to accumulate small bits of evidence and clues, but to accept what she knew, to dare see what was in front of her? How many times did she go into his study and see that he’d forgotten to lock the drawer and decide not to open it? Only a few meters from where the police officer has died in a pool of blood that stains the hands and shirt cuffs of Jiménez de Asúa, the men at a bar discuss soccer, a fruit seller raises the metal shutters of his store — no one knows what just happened. A month later, the judge who sentenced the Falangist gunmen, easy to arrest because they fled on foot after failing to start the getaway car, leaves his house one morning, barely takes a few steps on the sidewalk, raises his hand to hail a taxi, and is struck by bursts of fire from a machine pistol. At the house of the lawyer Eduardo Ortega y Gasset, a child delivers a basket of eggs with a lid in the shape of a hen, saying it comes from a grateful client. The lawyer lifts the lid and a bomb explodes that destroys half his house and leaves him uninjured.

“Nobody wants to see anything, my friend, and the person who has seen is quiet and does everything possible to forget,” Professor Rossman said one afternoon in the Café Aquarium de Madrid, a few minutes after shots were fired in the street and a young man was left dead, blown apart on the sidewalk of the Gran Vía, his skull shattered, blood and brain matter oozing down a shop window, “and if he does say anything they ridicule him or call him crazy or accuse him of provoking the disaster by irritating those at whom he points a finger. It’s not so bad, they say, you’re exaggerating, and with your exaggerations and warnings you put us all in danger. I didn’t want to see or understand either. I saw when it was the only thing I could do. I saw and acted in time and managed to escape, but even then I was blind, I knew I was going to make another, more serious mistake but let myself be carried along, telling myself that perhaps I was wrong, perhaps my daughter was right, my daughter and her comrades. Back then, three years ago, we could have immigrated without much difficulty to America — you know that some distinguished colleagues are already there. Or we could have gone to Prague, or Paris, or come directly here, to this beautiful Madrid. I planned to write to you then. I read that the government of the Spanish Republic offered a chair to Professor Einstein and opened its arms to other exiles from Germany. But I did nothing. I didn’t heed the warnings of my instinct, and even worse, of my rational intelligence. I didn’t dare contradict my daughter. And not to contradict her, I didn’t want to see what she didn’t see. We reached the Soviet border and an official delegation boarded the train to welcome us. They embraced us, opened bottles of vodka to toast us, representatives of the anti-Fascist German people, they presented my daughter with a large bouquet of red roses. But I looked and I saw. I saw the beggars in the station, was aware of the fear in the other passengers’ eyes at the approach of my daughter’s comrades who boarded the train to welcome us, aware of their rancor when they looked at us, their panic if you spoke to them. But I didn’t want to know what I was seeing. Forgive me, a foreigner, for saying this to you: you Spaniards don’t want to see either, you pretend not to hear.”

Perhaps that was also the afternoon when he saw the first dead body. That was why he still remembered the face, or what was left of it, with more detail than almost all the faces of the dead he saw in Madrid during the summer and the first weeks of that golden, sanguinary autumn before his flight, his anxiety-ridden and shame-filled desertion. Ignacio Abel hadn’t heard the first shot, hadn’t recognized it in the midst of the traffic noise on the other side of the large window in the café where he was talking with Professor Rossman, close to the intersection of Calle de Alcalá and the Gran Vía, at the hour when people were beginning to leave their offices. The ear must be trained: at first it doesn’t recognize gunshots. They sound more like small rockets, like a car backfiring. At a sidewalk café on Calle Torrijos, some young men fired at a group of Falangists drinking wine in the shade of an awning, and in the shooting a girl was killed who was sitting alone at a nearby table and whom no one knew. A dry, brief crack that in no way resembles gunshots in films or the pathetic click heard when someone pretends to fire a weapon on the stage. In retaliation for the attack on Calle Torrijos, a car stopped on the sidewalk in front of the General Union of Workers and some milkmen walking out of the building were riddled with bullets, the spilled milk slowly combining with blood. Ignacio Abel realized something was happening when heads looked up at the other tables in the Café Aquarium: the next series of shots was more recognizable because of the confused shouts that accompanied them, and because a moment later the traffic came to a halt — car engines, taxi horns, the high-pitched bells of streetcars. Suddenly no one was left at the outdoor tables, as if, after hearing a crash, a flock of birds had quickly taken flight. There were chairs overturned, glasses of beer and untouched cups of coffee on the round marble tables, bottles of seltzer trapping light in the shade of the awnings, lit cigarettes in the ashtrays. Behind panes of glass and at the open windows of nearby buildings, people watched in silence. Lying across the sidewalk, a body still twitching, one hand extended as if clawing at the ground, one leg trembling. He looked like a rag doll or a mannequin, wearing an impeccable suit of light-colored, lightweight fabric, a good shoe on the trembling foot, a sock with a diamond pattern. Half of his head showed the straight part in pomaded hair; the other half was a pulp of blood and brain matter. Tossed to the ground, stained with blood, their pages blowing in the gentle, late afternoon breeze of early June, were the Falangist newspapers the young man had been hawking next to the café terrace when a car stopped beside him long enough for the window to be lowered and the barrels of two pistols to appear, according to one of the few witnesses, a man whose voice trembled between gulps of cognac, surrounded by waiters and patrons as he described the scene. “Today it was their turn,” observed someone near Ignacio Abel, “and yesterday some young gentlemen from the Falange killed a man on the corner who was selling the Communist paper. One to one, like a soccer match. Tomorrow they’ll break the tie.” By then an ambulance had taken away the body and some municipal workers had cleaned the sidewalk with brooms and bursts of water from a hose, and a clerk from a hat shop passed a damp cloth over the shop window, supervised by a man in a pinstriped suit who smoked a cigar and bent toward the glass to be certain no trace of blood remained. A couple of Assault Guards in high boots and blue uniforms inspected the sidewalk where people were walking again, more numerous now and better dressed, on their way to movie theaters or coming out of them, beneath the light of the street lamps that had just been turned on, beneath the marquees with announcements of films, beside the recently lit shop windows. Ignacio Abel and Professor Rossman sat down again at their table next to the window. Under the electric light the professor seemed older, less well dressed in the same dark suit he’d worn in the winter, more singular in his misfortune, his exile, the torment of a clairvoyance that no one paid attention to and that never did him any good, never helped him avoid any error or prevent any future trouble. On the sidewalk, among the tables that were occupied again, young Falangists peddled their newspapers, some of them defiantly wielding pistols now that the Assault Guards had withdrawn, shouting slogans that erased traffic noise and that people sitting on the café terrace seemed not to hear, just as no one seemed to see the blue shirts and leather straps and the metallic gleam of weapons. On the corner of Calle de Alcalá and the Gran Vía, other Falangists watched the flow of people and traffic, on the alert to prevent another attack. Even from a distance, Ignacio Abel recognized Adela’s brother.

Perhaps that was also the first time he heard shots so close by. And never before had he seen a dead body in the street, struck down unexpectedly, not stiff and solemn in a bed, dressed in mourning, lit by candles; not lying on the boards of a wagon, covered by empty sacks. Ignacio Abel paid for the coffees, Professor Rossman’s two glasses of anise, the ham sandwich he’d devoured, sputtering bread and bits of food as he spoke; his former teacher was undergoing a deterioration that Ignacio Abel had observed at each stage with some physical revulsion as well as remorse, an oppressive sense of responsibility. An early summer heat made the signs worse (in Madrid, summer arrived abruptly, suffocatingly, at the beginning or in the middle of May, following the rain and cold of an unpleasant spring): his bald head, the odor of stale sweat and uric acid emanating from his clothes, the bitter coffee and sweet anise on his breath. Perhaps he really hadn’t done anything to help Professor Rossman aside from listening to his ramblings; out of stinginess, distraction, or laziness, one doesn’t do for a person in desperate need what wouldn’t be difficult to do. They left the café, and in the air on the Gran Vía one could almost touch the silky quality of May twilights. “You Spaniards don’t want to see what’s happening in your country,” Professor Rossman said, as indifferent as a prophet or a visionary to the sensual realities of the world, the sweetness of the air and the beauty of the women passing by, the calligraphy of neon lights, one after another, the name of a store, a brand of soap. He too had become accustomed to the normality of exile, to being a nobody after having had a respected name and an eminent position as a professor, to living with his daughter in a squalid pensión whose rent he couldn’t always pay on time. “You Spaniards think things are solid, that what has endured until now will remain forever. You don’t know that the world can collapse. We didn’t know when the war began in ’14, we were even blinder than you, stupefied and drunk with happiness, jubilantly invading the recruitment offices, marching in step behind military bands playing patriotic anthems, parading on the way to the slaughterhouse, parents pushing their sons to enlist, women throwing flowers at them from the windows. The most illustrious writers glorifying war in the newspapers, the great crusade of German culture!” He spoke in German, as if he were giving a speech, and some passersby stared at him: the bald oval head, the suit of anachronistic mourning, between formality and filth, his voice guttural and foreign, the black briefcase clutched in his arms as if it contained something valuable, his diplomas and certificates in Gothic characters, the letters of recommendation written in several languages, the obsolete passport with a seal stamped in red on the first page—Juden — Juif—the safe-conduct passes or letters of transit typed in Cyrillic characters, copies of visa applications, disheartening notices from the American embassy in Madrid, sheaves of international newspapers dismantled with scissors, full of underlinings, exclamation points, question marks, scribbled notes in the margins. Ignacio Abel regretted inviting him to have two drinks: he’d probably eaten little or nothing during the day aside from the ham sandwich. “You’d like not to see but you do see, my dear man. You pretend you don’t hear, just like those people in the café when shots were fired. But you’re an attentive person despite yourself. I talk and talk and the only person who pays any attention at all is you. I telephone and you’re the only one who answers. When I go to an office it’s always closed or about to close, and when I go to see someone, he can’t see me, or if he makes an appointment it’s for sometime in the future, and when I arrive they tell me he isn’t in or there’s been a misunderstanding and I have to come back a week later. Except for you, no one’s at home or in the office when I call. They think I’ll grow tired or won’t come back or fall ill, but I always come back, on the day I was told and at the exact time, not because I’m obstinate but because I don’t have anything else to do. You, my dear friend, are so busy you can’t understand me. You don’t know what it is to wake in the morning and have the whole day, your whole life, before you, with no occupation other than requesting things no one is obliged to give me, or seeking out people who don’t wish to see me. Or worse, attempting to sell things no one wants to buy, except for you, my good friend, who out of pity bought I don’t know how many of those fountain pens that scratch the paper and stain everything. At least my daughter has some German students now, also thanks to you and your wife, your delightful children, and your children’s friends whom you and your wife have persuaded, I don’t know how, to study German. I should give lessons too instead of going around trying to sell pens with fake brand names, visiting offices, requesting documents, but you were my student and know me, I don’t have patience for something as slow as teaching a language. They seem a lie, those days at the School! You remember, first in Weimar, then in the new building, in Dessau. I didn’t want to know what was happening outside those clean white walls, our beautiful world of large windows and right angles. The beauty of all useful things, do you remember? The integrity of the materials, the pure forms conceived to fulfill a specific task. I don’t remember reading in the paper that Hitler had been named Reich Chancellor. Another government crisis, one of many, the same politicians going and coming, approximately the same names, and I didn’t have the time or the desire to read newspapers or listen to speeches. There were more important things to do, practical, urgent things, classes, the administration of the School, technical problems that had to be resolved, my wife sick, my daughter causing me so much distress because she didn’t dare speak to anyone or look anyone in the eye and then suddenly became a Communist, and I couldn’t find out who infected her. People obsessed by politics seemed as incomprehensible to me as those obsessed by sports or horseracing. I thought my daughter was deranged, intoxicated by the books she was always reading, by Soviet films, by the eternal meetings often held in my house, hours and hours discussing, smoking, analyzing the articles in their newspapers after reading them aloud, her entire life from the time she woke up until she went to bed, growing paler, somnambulistic, looking at me as if I lived on another planet or were her class enemy, the Social-Fascist father more harmful than a Nazi, the hypocritical collaborator in the exploitation of the working class, the corrupt bourgeois advocating imperialist warfare. She inherited her mother’s musical talent and voice. She left the conservatory and stopped singing because opera was elitist, decadent entertainment. That was my daughter. She stopped taking care of herself and became ugly. You’ve seen her: she’s managed to be ugly and look much older than she is. Now she resembles the female guards in Soviet hotels and the typists at the Comintern. What can we do, my friend? How little is in our hands! Acting honestly, fulfilling our duty, doing our work well. And what good is it? Saying what our conscience orders us to say, though no one wants to listen and we earn the hatred not only of our enemies but also of those friends who prefer not to know the truth or see what’s in front of them. My daughter didn’t want to see what was in full view from the moment we reached Soviet customs. Neither did I, for her sake, because I saw it as being disloyal to her and to those people who offered us asylum when we had to leave Germany. And now I see the posters in Madrid and it frightens me, hammers and sickles and portraits, as if I were back in Moscow, or they’d come after us, looking for us. I saw the parade on May Day, the red shirts, the uniformed militias, the children marching in time, raising their fists, the portraits of Lenin and Stalin, that giant shield with the hammer and sickle high over the heads of people in the midst of red flags. Those people can’t imagine what their lives would be like if they’re ever unfortunate enough to have what they’ve been taught to dream of. I went there with my daughter and would have liked to leave as fast as I could, but she was hypnotized, you wouldn’t have believed it if you had seen her, after everything they did to her in Moscow, she remained at my side, clutching my arm, her eyes filled with tears when the band playing ‘The Internationale’—badly, of course — passed by, and she raised her fist, she whose Soviet comrades almost murdered her, the same ones who had welcomed her with a bouquet of red roses when we crossed the border. So there’s no cure, no one’s safe, no matter how far you think you’ve run. Listen to me, my friend, you have to escape from here as well. The blue shirts and the brown shirts and the black shirts and the red shirts are at the door, and it’s only a matter of time before they’ve infected everything. Look at the map and see all the space they’ve occupied. There’s no place for people like us. No one will defend us. Hitler has broken the Versailles Treaty and invaded the demilitarized zone with his armies, and the British and the French haven’t confronted him. I’m expecting letters from the Americas — not from the United States, not yet, though Mies and Gropius are there, and Breuer too. I write to them and they take a long time to answer. They say they’ll do what they can, but it’s difficult, you know, because of my daughter’s whim, because it’s recorded in our passports that we traveled to the Soviet Union, and for that reason they don’t trust us. Perhaps to Cuba or Mexico first, and from there it’ll be easier to enter the United States. You think there’s still time, don’t try to fool me, you hear what I say and think I’m exaggerating or beginning to lose my mind. You feel safe because you’re in your city and your country and at heart you think that I and others like me belong to another species, another race. But time’s running out, my friend, it slips away from us more and more quickly, and from you too, from those like us…”

At times the noise drowned out Professor Rossman’s voice: the traffic, the jovial conversations of people walking by, the music of a hurdy-gurdy or from the radio in a bar, an ambulance or police siren, the tremor in the pavement when a metro train passed, a man peddling cigarettes and neckties, the lazy rhythm of nightfall in the center of Madrid, when summer was announced by the scents in the air and the touch of a breeze, verbena dust, recently watered geraniums, pushcarts selling ice cream cones and meringues. Above the street and the traffic, the windows open to the mild night air, the Telephone Company Building stood in triumph, crowned by the luminous sphere of a clock. The night, the vibration of the city intensified his longing for Judith Biely, who was traveling outside Madrid on one of her educational excursions with American students to Toledo or Ávila. Ignacio Abel wanted to listen to Professor Rossman and accompany him to his pensión, but what he felt deep inside was an unspeakable repugnance. What he really wanted was to be alone and let himself drift through the human anthill of the street, waiting for Judith to miraculously appear around a corner, looking for him, having returned early from her trip. But it was late: the scarlet light of the hands on the Telephone Company’s clock pointed to eight. Now he remembered that he had promised Adela he’d be home not much after eight-thirty for a large family dinner, somebody’s birthday or saint’s day. In the elevator he smelled the heavy perfume of Adela’s mother and the liniment her father applied in massive amounts to relieve his rheumatism. From the landing he heard the family voices, the collective pleasure of the Ponce-Cañizares Salcedo clan at coming together en masse. Before entering the living room, Ignacio Abel crossed the hall toward his bedroom, but he spotted the light in the children’s room and went in to give them a kiss. It was then that for the first time he saw a pistol in his own house: his son held the butt in both hands, one eye closed, and aimed at the mirror, following the lighthearted instructions of his uncle Víctor, who wore the blue shirt and leather straps under his sports jacket.