In the Night of Time

16

ISOLATED GUNFIRE ON a fresh morning in May, the air perfumed with mountain aromas: thyme, rosemary flowers, white petals with yellow pistils among the bright rockrose leaves. The forest cut down a few years earlier to level the ground for University City was coming back to life on the cleared land and inclines of unfinished construction sites, the open spaces that weren’t playing fields yet. The whistles of bullets blended with the whistles of swallows; gunshots like hollow explosions of fireworks at a distant fair, beyond the clattering typewriters and open windows of the drafting office, where draftsmen and typists looked out with more curiosity than alarm, trying to determine where the shots were coming from. The air still clean, the ashtrays and wastebaskets empty, the secretaries’ lips and nails bright red. He liked that time of morning, the entire day ahead, the impulse to work still not exhausted by fatigue or tedium. Perhaps the mail clerk had been distracted by the commotion and delivery would be late: he’d come at his slow pace, his expression both self-important and servile, holding the large tray, and when he entered the office, ceremoniously requesting permission to do so, perhaps Ignacio Abel would recognize among the official letters an envelope with Judith’s handwriting. As soon as they parted they began writing to each other. They wanted to relieve with written words the emptiness of their time apart, prolong a conversation they never grew tired of. More gunfire now, not pistols but rifles. At what moment had his ear grown accustomed, begun to differentiate? Better to behave as if he’d heard nothing: not look up from the desk, the drawing board, keep busy each minute of the morning, dictating letters, receiving calls, insisting against all odds that construction would go on; he’d tell his secretary to return to her typewriter instead of spreading rumors about gunfire; he’d call the Assault Guard barracks and request that they send reinforcements, though it would be more practical to call Dr. Negrín, who’d bring to bear his political influence. Much more vigilance would be required night and day at the building sites now that the Anarchists of the National Confederation of Labor wanted to declare another construction strike.

He should have spoken to Negrín some time ago but always put it off. He should have told him he’d been invited to spend the next academic year in America and hadn’t done so; he should have asked his opinion before accepting the invitation but said nothing to him; now he would have to tell him he’d accepted without requesting official permission. He hadn’t said anything to Adela and his children either. The invitation from Burton College had arrived in a long, ivory-colored envelope, and when he saw it on the mail tray he quickly put it in his pocket, then in the locked drawer where he hid Judith’s letters and photos. He responded with vague remarks when the children asked about the promised trip, the nocturnal journey in a sleeper car to Paris, the Atlantic crossing, the elevated trains and skyscrapers in New York, the Automats, which Lita had read about in encyclopedias and illustrated magazines. He put off the uncomfortable moment of reciting the explanation he’d elaborated, aware that he had put himself in the contemptible position of lying when he promised them, months earlier, something no one had asked for: it wasn’t a good idea for the children to miss a year of school, he planned to say; the salary was lower than it had seemed at first; there was no guarantee he’d be commissioned to design the library building (a clearing in a forest on the other side of the ocean, a few lines sketched on the broad sheets of a notebook, barely the shadow of a form that perhaps would never exist, as uncertain as his future). He discovered that a lie was a loan for which usurious interest accumulated in a short time, and new lies extended the time at an even higher rate and left him at the mercy of increasingly impatient creditors. Construction was advancing much more slowly than anticipated (everything so difficult, so slow, applications paralyzed in offices, machinery scant and defective, the means of delivery and transport primitive, the men unwilling, working in the sun with knotted handkerchiefs on their heads, breathing heavily, saliva-soaked cigarette butts hanging from their mouths, looking around in fear of gunmen and assailants); even if the construction strike was not total, it was clear that University City would not be inaugurated in October. To leave before the end — wasn’t that disloyal to Negrín? Besides, Judith Biely took it for granted he’d travel alone to America. Ignacio Abel wasn’t lying when he told her he wanted that as much as she did, but he did lie when he led her to assume his wife and children knew about a decision that by now was irreversible. It wasn’t a complete lie, perhaps merely a truth delayed. Sooner or later that difficult familial conversation would be inevitable; he imagined it so clearly, it was almost as if it had already taken place (Miguel’s serious, aggrieved face, Adela’s expression of confirmed disillusionment, his daughter’s peeved but unshakable faith in him), as when the alarm clock rings and you dream that you’ve already gotten up and showered and the dream allows you a few more minutes of uneasy sleep.

The days and weeks were slipping away without his taking action or saying anything; summer was approaching and there was less and less time until his journey was a problem only because others would have to find out about it, like a bank teller who thinks his embezzlement is less of a crime because it hasn’t been discovered yet. (It had been the same twelve years earlier, when he was going to leave for Germany: the boy sick, almost a newborn, Adela’s collapse after the birth, and he, the letter confirming his trip in his pocket, saying nothing, waiting.) The appearance of normality was in and of itself a poor antidote to disaster. Working every day, presenting an irreproachable face to the world, confirming that the landscape of buildings and avenues on the other side of the picture windows increasingly resembled the great utopian model of University City, its abstract buildings surrounded by groves of trees and playing fields, its straight avenues and winding paths along which groups of students would walk someday, in spite of the slowness of the work, the scarcity of money, the stalled applications, the apocalyptic propagandists for the strike and the Anarchist revolution who appeared at work sites brandishing red-and-black flags and automatic pistols. Getting up each morning and having breakfast with Adela and the children, reading the paper, while through the open balconies the fresh morning air came in, perfumed by the blossoms of young acacias; while his desire for Judith throbbed in secret (he’d call her as soon as he left the house, from the first telephone booth; better yet, he’d close himself in his study right now and ask her in a low voice to meet him as soon as she could, wherever she liked, in the house of assignation, in a café, in the Retiro) and the weight of postponed decisions grew like a barely perceived tumor. The greater the upheaval, the more he was driven to give no sign, to not lose control of what others saw. Going out and not thinking about the possibility of a gunman waiting by the entrance. Staying in the office, so busy with a calculation or the correction of a drawing that not even gunfire could make him look up for more than a moment. Not going into the corridor to look for the clerk with the unctuous manner and the tray of mail. Not sitting and looking at the telephone, as if the simple effort of his attention might cause a ring that would be a call from Judith. He gathered the courage to call Dr. Negrín at the Congress of Deputies, and a secretary granted him the relief of telling him that Don Juan wasn’t in but she’d give him the message. The gunfire had stopped; from a distance came the sound of an ambulance siren or an approaching Assault Guard van. His secretary entered his office without knocking, upset, speaking in a rush, almost not giving Ignacio Abel time to hide under a folder of documents the letter to Judith Biely he’d begun writing.

“The Anarchists, Don Ignacio, a picket line. They came in a car, as in the movies, to the Medical School and started shooting at the workers on the morning shift, calling them Fascists and traitors to the working class. But some boys from the Socialist militia on guard duty shot back from the windows.”

“Where were the police?”

“Where do you think? They arrived after the gunmen had fled. You should’ve seen the militia boys, how they fought back. The car windows were shattered. And what a pool of blood when they drove away. One of them must’ve been hit.”

They chatted about the gunfire the way they would talk on Monday mornings about the Sunday soccer games or a boxing match: only a minor injury among the workers in spite of the shooting and the broken glass, but one or two of the others must be in serious condition, judging by the blood that poured from the car they escaped in; the blood bright red, not the black liquid of the movies, but dark and quickly coagulated, absorbed by the earth, raked by laborers who covered it with sand before returning to their work, guarded by young militiamen whom they reverently called the Motorized, a fanciful name originating from the fact that in parades some of them patrolled on old motorcycles with sidecars. “At least one of them’s dead, that’s certain,” said the mail clerk, the tray of letters abandoned on a table, among them perhaps one that Judith Biely had written and mailed the day before, only an hour after leaving him. “Two men carried him to the car and he couldn’t stand up and his face and shirt were covered in blood.” If he died, they’d bury him amid gales of banners, the coffin covered with a red-and-black flag, advancing above a mass of heads and hands anxious to touch it, to hold it high, carried like a boat on the current of a river that flooded the entire street. They’d sing anthems, shake clenched fists, shout promises of reparation and revenge, insults hurled at the closed balconies of bourgeois residences. But a shot or an explosion could provoke a wave of rage and panic in the crowd that would demolish it like a cyclone in a field of wheat: more shots, real ones now, the Assault Guard’s horses neighing, broken glass, streetcars and automobiles overturned. Someone lay dead on the pavement, and the collective liturgy of death would be repeated a little more passionately: perhaps someone attending the funeral or a passerby walked in front of a bullet; a Falangist gunman who’d fired from a moving car, around which the swelling crowd soon closed. This dead man would have his funeral with an identical mob, with other anthems and other flags, with speeches in hoarse voices and “Long live”s and “Death to”s before an open grave. At the funerals of the leftist dead there were forests of red flags and raised fists and parades of young militiamen in uniform; at the other funerals the smoke of incense rose, dispensed by priests, along with a choir of voices reciting the rosary. So ironic that both sides seemed blind to the similarity between their funeral rites, their celebrations of courage and sacrifice, of martyrdom, the rejection of the material world in the name of paradise on earth or the kingdom of heaven, as if they wanted to fast-forward to Judgment Day and hated nonbelievers and agnostics much more than their professed enemies. After the funeral of Jiménez de Asúa’s police escort, the crowd returning from the cemetery attacked a church that eventually was enveloped in flames; firemen who came to put out the fire were greeted by bullets. During those days in May, Madrid was a city of funerals and bullfights. Almost every afternoon, crowds walked along Calle de Alcalá to the bullfight arena or the East Cemetery.

“You can’t go around unarmed, Don Ignacio,” Eutimio said when, at the end of the day, he told him about that morning’s gunfire at the Medical School construction site. Eutimio, his senior by only a few years, looked much older, though stronger as well, with his erect posture, large hands, and dark face crossed by horizontal lines like hatchet blows in a block of wood. “You take a big chance coming alone every morning in your car and leaving in the evening when nobody’s around.”

The pistol Eutimio showed him after closing the office door behind him was much larger than Negrín’s, more primitive than the one Adela’s brother had. It looked like a solid piece of iron hammered into summary form on an anvil. Eutimio remained standing, beret in hand. Ignacio Abel knew that asking him to sit down was useless. So he stood too, leaning against the window, uncomfortable in his own office, his custom-tailored clothes, the softness of his hands, before this man who’d known him when he was a boy and his father took him to work with his crew of masons on holidays and during school vacations. Eutimio, then an apprentice stucco worker, took care of Ignacio: he applied grease to his hands skinned raw by the work, burned by the plaster and lime, and he showed him how to hold his fingers together and blow on the tips to keep them warm in the winter dawns. Ignacio had the admiration for him a small child has for a boy who’s a few years older and yet moves among adults and behaves like them. Eutimio had seen his father’s face before it was covered with the sack.

“I’m nearsighted, Eutimio. I’ve never fired a gun in my life.”

“But didn’t you do your service in Morocco?”

“I was so useless they assigned me to an office.”

“Not useless, Don Ignacio, well connected, if you’ll allow me to speak frankly.” Eutimio, the beret in his hand and his head slightly lowered, had in his lively eyes a gleam both affectionate and sarcastic. “The useless ones who didn’t study and couldn’t pull any strings were sent to the frontlines anyway and died before anybody else.”

“If I had a pistol, I’d be a danger to everyone except the man who wanted to kill me.”

“A pistol can save your life.”

“Captain Faraudo had one in his pocket and they killed him all the same.”

“The sons of bitches came up behind him. His wife was with him. He was holding her arm.”

“It has to be the law that defends us, Eutimio.”

“Don’t tell me that an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth doesn’t work. If they are out to kill us, we have to defend ourselves. One of them for each one of us. You know I’m not a violent man, but we have no choice.”

“That’s what the other side says.”

“Forgive me for saying so, Don Ignacio, but you don’t understand the class struggle.”

“You haven’t become a Leninist overnight, Eutimio, have you?”

“There are things you can’t understand, with all due respect.” Eutimio spoke slowly, distinctly. As a young man he’d listened to the speeches of Pablo Iglesias, and every day he read the lead articles in El Socialista aloud, in a clear voice. “You may have a Socialist Party card and one for the UGT, like your father, may he rest in peace, but what counts in the class struggle isn’t what you’ve read but the shoes you wear or what your hands are like. Your father began as a bricklayer’s helper, and when he had the accident he was a master builder, but we called him Señor Miguel, not Don Miguel. You, Don Ignacio, are a gentleman. Not a parasite and not an exploiter, because you earn your living with your work and your talent. But you wear shoes, not espadrilles, and if you had to use a shovel or a pick, in five minutes your hands would be covered with blisters, like when you were a little boy and your father would take you with us to the work site.”

“But Eutimio, I thought the class struggle was between owners and workers, not between one group of workers and another. When all of you start shooting, why fire at men who wear espadrilles too?”

Eutimio stood looking at him with some surprise but also with a good deal of indulgence, as when he was an awkward, chubby little boy who had to be pushed to climb up to the first plank of a scaffold.

“Just what I said, Don Ignacio — you don’t understand. Probably, when people get desperate, they stop acting rationally. I’m not much good at arguing, but with this in my hand, nobody’s going to silence me.”

“Not silence, Eutimio, but worse, kill you. Never mind the pistol you carry. The question is, do you have the reflexes to confront those gangsters? And if somebody’s desperate because he doesn’t have work or his children go hungry, I understand his holding up a store or robbing a bank, whatever. I understand those people who wait in the pine groves until nightfall to steal construction materials, or come here in the morning hoping we’ll give them a day’s work. It drives me crazy when the guards take them away in handcuffs, or when other workers chase them with rocks so they won’t compete for the little they have. But you tell me what those gunmen wanted today, or the ones who’ll probably come tomorrow to take revenge.”

“They want the social revolution, Don Ignacio. Not for workers’ wages to go up but for workers to be in charge. To finally turn the tables, as they say. No more exploiters and no more exploited.”

Eutimio, who’d always had the sonorous, precise speech of Madrid’s working-class neighborhoods, nourished by the quick wit of the street and by politically charged novels, expressed himself now as if he were reciting a propaganda pamphlet or a newspaper editorial. The secretary came in with a folder of papers to be signed, and the foreman looked down and adopted an instinctive attitude of docility, retreating toward the door, as if to clear away any suspicion of improper proximity to Ignacio Abel. “With your permission,” he said, bowing, both hands holding his beret. Any indication of familiarity had disappeared from his face. In an instant he’d canceled any link he might have had with the director of the office, seemed to have erased from his memory the image of the boy whose hands, stiff with cold, chafed and raw, he rubbed with grease, in the distant time at the turn of the century, on very early mornings illuminated by gaslight.

From the car after he left work, Ignacio Abel saw him walking alone to the distant streetcar stop, his quick step, the bag with his lunch pail over his shoulder, hands in pockets, among the groups of workers who flowed from the buildings where only custodians and armed watchmen were left, the afternoon sun on the recently installed windowpanes, motionless machines, cranes oscillating in the air crossed by swallows and swifts. Assault Guards stood here and there asking for identification and searching those leaving the construction area.

“Get in, Eutimio, I’ll take you home.”

He slowed down to move alongside him, but the foreman resisted, barely turning his head, walking faster. Perhaps he didn’t want other workers to see him getting into the car of the associate director of construction.

“I’ll get dust all over the upholstery, Don Ignacio.”

“Don’t be silly. Weren’t you saying I shouldn’t be so overconfident? Well, I don’t like to see you walking alone here either.”

“Nothing to worry about, Don Ignacio, they won’t interfere with me.” He’d dropped into the passenger seat with the weariness of an old man and had the pistol in his hand, the black barrel pointing toward Ignacio Abel. “And if one of them doesn’t know who I am, I have this to make the introductions.”

“You’d better move the pistol away, otherwise you won’t just get dust on my upholstery, you’ll fire it by accident when we hit a pothole and blow my head off.”

“What an idea, Don Ignacio. As you get older you’re more and more like your late father. I always say, if there were more gentlemen like you, the world would be a different place.”

“Aren’t you getting tired of calling me a gentleman? Aren’t I a worker? Remember what the constitution says: Spain is a republic of workers of every class.”

“Sounds nice, if only it were true.” Eutimio leaned back in the seat, caressed the leather upholstery appreciatively with his broad fingertips, brushing the instrument panel with them, the ivory buttons on the car radio, carefully, as if afraid of damaging them. “But you can’t eat the constitution. You know what the landowners say who’d rather lose the harvest than pay decent wages to their workers.”

“‘Eat the Republic.’”

“Exactly. They step on people and are shocked when those they’ve stepped on turn around and bite them.”

“But that wasn’t what we were talking about.”

“Now you’re angry with me, Don Ignacio, because I called you a gentleman, but you shouldn’t be. I haven’t called you an exploiter, God forbid. You haven’t robbed or deceived anybody, and you’re as much a Socialist as I am, or at least as Don Julián Besteiro and Don Fernando de los Ríos are, and they don’t have calluses on their hands either, as far as I know. The masses you gentlemen like best are the ones in the head, as Prieto says. But things are the way they are, and from what I understand, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels taught us to see them as they are, without cobwebs over our eyes, according to the principles of materialism.”

“Now you’re the one who resembles Besteiro, with that talk.”

“It’s clear, if you’ll forgive me, that you drive a car and I walk, or ride a streetcar at best. You wear a hat and I wear a beret, Don Ignacio, and if it rains you don’t get wet, because along with driving in your car you wear new shoes with soles that don’t get soaked with water, and your feet don’t get cold like a man wearing old boots with holes in the bottoms. You work hard, of course you do, but under a roof, and with heat, and when it’s hot you work in the shade, not in the sun. If one of your children gets sick, God forbid, you don’t have to take him to the welfare hospital, where he’ll get worse as soon as he breathes the air that smells of misery and death, and if he gets a little worse a good doctor comes right away and prescribes the medicines he needs and you can pay for, and if he needs it there’ll be a place for him in a sanatorium where they heal lungs with good food and the Sierra air. That’s the truth, Don Ignacio, and you know it. Would you like it if things were different? Of course you would. But it’s a law of nature that you don’t have the same desires or the same urgency as a workman. Sorry, as a worker, to use the correct term. And let’s be clear: I have no quarrel with you and wouldn’t permit anyone to speak ill of you in my presence. I’ve known you since you were a boy. I know how much you had to struggle to go on with your studies, when you and your mother were alone after your father’s accident, may he rest in peace. There’s your merit and talent, but there’s your father’s too. He sacrificed to give you school instead of having you work with him at the sites, which is what another, less enlightened father would’ve done, one less able to move ahead in his trade and earn a little money, and if what happened to him hadn’t happened, I always say Señor Miguel would’ve ended up as one of the great builders in Madrid. Anyway, you’re as good as gold, Don Ignacio, and you remember what it means to work with your hands, but you’re on the side of the gentlemen and I’m on the side of the workers, as clear as the fact that you live in the Salamanca district and I’m in Cuatro Caminos. And let’s be clear: I’m not like some others, you know me, I don’t feel resentful toward anybody, and I don’t think that to bring social justice we have to cut off heads like they do in Russia. I wish I’d had a father like yours and not a poor bricklayer who put me to work as an apprentice at the age of eight. I wish a child of mine had been born with the talent God or natural selection gave you — there’s an opinion about everything. But the way I see Spain, really awful things can happen, and I often wonder which side you’ll be on when the dike breaks.”

“There’s no reason it has to break, Eutimio.”

“That’s what you and I think, each from our place in life, because we’re reasonable people, and forgive me for comparing myself to you. Though I have much less education than you do, I’ve learned something reading the papers and all the books I can, and studying people since I began to earn a living in your father’s crew. But everybody isn’t like us, Don Ignacio. Let’s not kid ourselves, you live like what you are, like a bourgeois, and me, for better or worse, have my needs covered for now. We’re both calm, it seems to me, but others who come pushing from behind have much more quarrelsome blood, and there’s not a lot of good sense on your side or mine.”

“Aren’t we on the same side? Aren’t we in the same party?”

“You see how they shoot each other inside the party. I open El Socialista or Claridad and I have to put it down right away so I won’t read the terrible things some comrades write about others. If we use up so much anger fighting our own people, how much will be left to face the enemy? There’s a lot of bad blood, Don Ignacio. The crops are rotting in the fields because this year it rained more than usual and the owners would rather lose the harvest than pay a pittance in wages. Some men are born vermin and others become that way because they’re driven to get more or were treated like vermin from the time they were born.”

As he spoke, Eutimio became more impassioned, breathing more deeply, not looking at Ignacio Abel, his eyes on the road. This man awakened in him a kind of tenderness he no longer felt for anyone, returned him to a time and a part of himself that were accessible only through the presence of Eutimio. His archaic oratory is what he’d listened to when men held meetings on Saturday nights in the small living room of the porter’s lodging, filled with voices and tobacco smoke. Thanks to Eutimio, the thought of his father acquired an intensity and lucidity he rarely experienced anymore, or only in dreams — his father and the overprotected boy, the boy who was now older than his dead father. Eutimio belonged to that time (the very early mornings, the weariness at the end of the day, the rough solemnity of the Socialist meetings where men dressed in dark smocks addressed one another with the formal usted and raised a hand to speak), and when he relived it, somehow his place in the present was turned upside down, the stable, solid life that seemed inevitable and yet might not have happened because there wasn’t any link between it and the life he’d led during that past time, whose only witness now was Eutimio. Nothing back then foretold the present. The boy, studying at the table with the built-in foot warmer in the light of an oil lamp when the wheels of a wagon stopped near the small street-level window, had nothing to do with the gray-haired man with confident gestures who now drove a car along the outer boulevards of Madrid toward Calle de Santa Engracia and the traffic circle of Cuatro Caminos. But Eutimio, sitting beside him, knew; capable of establishing connections with his clear memory and sharp intelligence, he could recognize in Ignacio Abel’s serious profile traits from his childhood, as well as the faces of his parents slowly revealed by age; the only thing that remained of them was a blurred, solemn photograph of pale tinted faces, as primitive as their postures or her embroidered collar and topknot and his slicked-down hair divided by a center part, his mustache with waxed ends. “They’re your paternal grandparents,” he’d once explained to his children, who looked at the photo as surprised as if they had seen people not only from another century and social class but of another species. But memories were not all that Eutimio brought him. There were also physical sensations that invoked his father’s presence: his hard hands, his gestures, the smell of corduroy trousers.

“You can drop me off here, Don Ignacio. You continue on your way home. I can take a streetcar from here.”

“Door-to-door service,” he said with a smile and shrugged, confounded by a feeling of shyness he wouldn’t admit to anyone, not even Judith Biely. “Let’s see if I can corrupt you with the comforts of bourgeois life.”

“The people in the CNT are calling me a strikebreaker as it is.”

“That can’t be anything to worry about.”

They went up Calle de Santa Engracia, past the magnificent Water Tower, rising above the city like a Persian funerary monument before the distant blue curtain of the Sierra. Ignacio Abel drove in silence, listening to Eutimio, observing out of the corner of his eye the change in the other man’s posture as they approached his neighborhood: uncomfortably erect, knees together, unwilling to abandon himself to an intimacy as easily withdrawn as granted. Before it reached its limits, Madrid expanded into rural spaciousness, rows of low houses in front of which women embroidered in the sun, sitting on rush chairs in large lots surrounded by plank fences covered with faded election posters. A dusty, village light floated above the Cuatro Caminos traffic circle: ragpickers’ wagons, herds of goats, cowbells and the bells of streetcars, circling a waterless fountain that looked like a stage set, a fountain dislodged from the bourgeois promenade for which it was built. The strongest notes of color were the green and red of geraniums on the balconies. A group of children kicking a ball made of rags in the middle of the street interrupted their game to run alongside the car. They winked and made mocking faces, almost pressing their noses to the windows. One ran with a crippled leg, leaning on a crutch; on the head of another a rash of ringworm was turning white.

“Be careful, Don Ignacio, these kids could throw themselves under the wheels.”

Behind grilles, from balconies and the doorways of small workshops, taverns, and grocery stores, suspicious, attentive eyes observed the car’s passing. Three men approached, dressed in white shirts and old jackets, caps above their faces, legs far apart. In the waistband of one of them was the black butt of a pistol. They stood motionless in front of the car in the middle of the street, looking at Ignacio Abel, who kept the engine running and, with instinctive caution, had both hands still and visible on the steering wheel, his eyes alert and at the same time avoiding their questioning, defiant stares.

“Don’t worry, Don Ignacio, these are good boys.”

“What do they want?”

“They’re on watch.”

Eutimio lowered his window and signaled to the one wearing a pistol, who examined the interior of the car, a contemptuous expression at the corner of his mouth where a cigarette burned. A boy’s nose was flattened against each window, open mouths fogging the glass with their breath, their eyes looking inside as if into an aquarium.

“You can trust this gentleman, comrade,” said Eutimio, avoiding the other man’s eyes, which were close, the smoke of his cigarette in his face. “He’s my boss at work and I’ll answer for him.”

The men spoke briefly among themselves, then moved aside to allow them to pass, coming together again to watch the car, like watching a train or ship move away. In his rearview mirror, Ignacio Abel saw the men recede and let out a sigh of relief not as inaudible as he imagined.

“They frightened you a little, Don Ignacio. Nothing to worry about. You have to understand that in this neighborhood, when you see a car like yours, it means something bad’s going to happen.”

“The Falangists?”

“Or the monarchists. Or the boys from Young Popular Action. They speed up Santa Engracia and run over whatever’s in front of them. They shoot and don’t care who they hit. Last week they killed a poor woman sweeping at her front door. The class struggle, Don Ignacio. They lean their heads out of car windows, stretch out their arms, and shout ‘Arriba España!’ Then they turn into Cuatro Caminos and nobody can find them.”

Now Ignacio Abel observed more attentively his expressions and glances, as well as the mixture of discomfort and confidence Eutimio felt when he was recognized close to home. The confined space of the car and their physical proximity had favored an ease of manner that would vanish as soon as Eutimio got out, with a gesture of farewell that would conceal the intention to shake hands instead of thanking him by bending his head slightly as he stood on the sidewalk, having removed his beret. A blind at a balcony moved to one side; a woman’s hand shook a curtain of cheap cloth; some boys playing leapfrog interrupted their game, and one turned his head to look at the car with an expression at once serious and adult; the rope some girls were jumping, colored ribbons in their hair, remained motionless on the pounded earth; young men in shirtsleeves approached the door of a tavern.

“I’m inviting you to have a glass of wine and get the fear out of your body, Don Ignacio.”

“Eutimio, come on, this wasn’t anything to worry about.” Having shown his alarm so obviously embarrassed Ignacio Abel. Affectionate, almost paternal, Eutimio still took some pleasure in the weakness of a superior, more evident because when he got out of the car, Ignacio Abel found himself without defenses in unfamiliar territory. “I’ll have a glass if you let me invite you.”

He had plenty of time: he didn’t have an appointment with Judith Biely and had no desire to return home on a May evening that seemed to have halted in a luminosity not yet dimmed by twilight. When he returned home he’d permit himself the consolation of telling Adela the truth — this would soothe the conscience of a recent, still inexpert liar — but she’d probably think his conversation with a foreman in a tavern in Cuatro Caminos was a lie, one of many she didn’t bother to pretend she believed. Distracted, happy, almost virtuous, as if today’s truth somehow would compensate for deceit on so many other occasions, he wouldn’t even notice Adela’s incredulity.

“Don’t worry about the car, Don Ignacio, you can trust us here. You don’t have to lock it. We’re poor but honest, like in the operettas.”

The children not only looked at the car — the soft green paint, the butter-colored leather top, the crank handle, nickel-plated like the wheel spokes — they looked at him in particular, as if he were from another universe: white hands, made-to-measure suit, the peak of a handkerchief in his jacket pocket, the gleam of his silk tie, his two-toned shoes. The children’s black eyes were a mirror that reflected a distorted version of himself, the tall, strange man they were seeing, the one who got out of the car, slamming the door and looking around with an expression of instinctive guardedness, like a colonial dignitary on an inspection tour, benevolent, perhaps, but always distant, possessing an arrogance that didn’t need to be a personal attitude because it was engraved on the character of his caste. He thought of his own children as he looked at these faces, which had a radiant dignity in spite of the poverty. He saw not the man he was now but the boy who so many years ago, late in the afternoon, went out fearfully to play on another street much like this one, in his neighborhood at the other end of Madrid. For a few seconds the children’s voices had echoed in a kind of concave eternity, in the realm outside time of games and street songs, the ones he’d listened to so often in the porter’s lodging, coming through the window high above his head, at the level of the sidewalk. He hadn’t been one of them, not even then. A pure moment recovered from that distant time made him stop in the doorway of the tavern, happy and lost, blinking as if the afternoon light had blinded him.

“The same thing happened when you were a boy,” Eutimio was saying, his face close and slightly out of focus. “You’d stand there, thinking your thoughts, and your father, may he rest in peace, would say, ‘This boy of mine looks like he’s turning into a sleepwalker.’”

The tavern, more like a wine cellar, was dark and deep and smelled of sawdust and sour wine, casks and herring in brine. Entering felt like advancing through the half-light of the past: as a boy his father would send him to taverns like this one to buy a pint of wine or to take a message to one of the masons or artisans who worked for him. But here, soccer, bullfight, and boxing posters lined the whitewashed walls, and a large radio played behind the counter. On the gaudy print from an almanac, under a legend that proclaimed Happy 1936! the Republic was a young woman with a Phrygian cap pulled to one side of her head, her body barely covered by the folds of a tricolor flag that molded her breasts and revealed the fleshy thigh of a chorus girl or dancer.

The men drinking at the zinc bar and at the tables greeted Eutimio and examined Ignacio Abel from head to toe. Their presence and voices filled the space, and they gave off a strong sensation of vigor and weariness after work. The new arrivals sat at an isolated table, and the tavernkeeper brought them a squared flask of red wine and two low, thick glasses, still wet from the rinse water. When Eutimio sat down, the pistol in the inside pocket of his jacket bulged visibly.

“It seems unbelievable, Don Ignacio, that you and I are sitting here at the same table, when at work I have to take off my cap to speak to you and it’s not a good idea to look you in the eye.”

“Don’t exaggerate, Eutimio. Hasn’t life changed at all since my father’s time? And it’ll change even more now with the Popular Front government.”

“A government of fine bourgeois gentlemen, Don Ignacio, who ignore the workers’ vote.”

“Our party’s to blame, yours and mine. The one that hasn’t allowed a Socialist to be president. It was so difficult to bring in the Republic and now they don’t want it anymore, they don’t think it’s enough. Now they want a Soviet revolution. You were at the May Day demonstration where the Socialists paraded, and it looked as if they were on Red Square in Moscow. Red flags with the hammer and sickle, portraits of Lenin and Stalin. Our people were different from the Communists only because they wore red shirts, not sky-blue ones. Not a single flag of the Republic, Eutimio, the Republic that came in because we Socialists wanted it, because the Republicans were nothing. But these May Day Socialists didn’t cheer for the Republic, they cheered for the Red Army. To the great joy of the right, as you can imagine.”

“I already told you, Don Ignacio, the Republic’s pretty but it doesn’t feed you.”

“And do strikes with gun battles and burned churches feed you?”

“You don’t have to say that to me, Don Ignacio. I’m an old man, you know, and I’ve seen all kinds of things, but until now life hasn’t gone badly for me. I have a decent little house right near here and a small orchard in the village, and my wife and daughters sew on Singers and earn a wage that’s no worse than mine. Since I know how to read and write and have a good head for numbers, I could be a foreman, and in my house we might have hard times but not poverty. My younger boy, thanks to you, has a job as a clerk in the waterworks office, and though he doesn’t earn much, he’s hard-working. At night he’s studying to be a draftsman, and I hope he can find a job in the University City office someday soon, if you give him a hand. But other men are much worse off, Don Ignacio, and they don’t have patience and good judgment, and if they do, they can lose them when there’s no work and not much justice and they see their children die of hunger, or they lose their house because they can’t pay for it and find themselves sleeping under bridges or spending the nights in doorways.”

“It can’t all be done at once, Eutimio.” Now it was his voice that sounded false, even though he was saying something reasonable, perhaps as reasonable as it was sterile. “The Republic’s only five years old. The Popular Front won only three months ago.”

“And who are we to tell anybody to be patient? Or to wait a few months to give food to his children or take them to a doctor? Neither of us is going to bed without supper tonight, and excuse me for comparing myself to you.”

“And is setting off bombs and killing people going to solve anything? Having an armed rebellion against the Republic as they did in Asturias? Threatening every day to break the truce and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat?”

“The working class has to defend itself, Don Ignacio.” Eutimio gestured for him to lower his voice. “If it weren’t for those boys on watch outside, you and I probably couldn’t have our quiet glass of wine.”

“You people don’t understand, Eutimio.” As soon as he said it, he realized the plural was offensive, but he was becoming inflamed, and an unpleasant but strong feeling of superiority erupted in him. “There are laws that are above everybody. There are police, there are judges. We’re not in the Wild West or Chicago, the way everybody seems to think. You don’t take up arms against the legitimate government just because you don’t like the election results. You don’t go around with a pistol taking the law into your own hands.”

“I’m not a fool, Don Ignacio.” Eutimio had left his empty glass on the table and was looking at him seriously, offended, at the same time leaning his head forward to make sure no one heard him. “What you say about the law is fine, but at this point nobody believes it anymore. Tell it to the rebellious military who never stop conspiring and the judges who let the Falangist gunmen who kill workers go free.”

“Then what should we do? Should we all arm ourselves? ‘One man, one pistol’ instead of ‘One man, one vote’?”

“I don’t know what we should do, Don Ignacio. Probably younger people whose ideals are stronger than ours will give us the solution. When I was a boy and heard Pablo Iglesias and the speakers back then talking about the classless society, tears came to my eyes. And now, instead of the classless society, what I dream about is my little orchard and not losing my wages. Maybe you didn’t imagine either when you were a boy that you’d enjoy driving a car and living in a building with an elevator in the Salamanca district—”

“We’re back to that again.”

“Don’t make me lose my patience, Don Ignacio. Or my respect either, if you’ll permit me. And don’t raise your voice — you’ll probably say something other people won’t like to hear. Young people have a spirit we don’t understand anymore. Even my boy, who never broke a dish, who always went from home to work and work to home, joined the Communist Youth last year. Upsetting for a father, but now they’ve joined with our youth groups, which makes me feel calmer. You and I will be happy if this world we know gets a little better — after all, it’s our world. But what they want is a different world. Haven’t you seen the posters? ‘We carry a new world in our hearts.’”

Literature again, he thought, but he didn’t say it for fear of offending Eutimio. Cheap literature, newspaper trash, third-rate verses, sometimes sung in anthems for greater effect. An entire country, an entire continent infected by mediocre literature, drunk on shoddy music, operetta marches, and bullfight paso dobles. In this tavern, with its poor electric light and stink of bad wine, the floor littered with wet sawdust and cigarette butts, he realized that deep in his soul he didn’t feel much sympathy for his fellow men, that he needed the vagueness and protection of a certain distance to get along with them, to become emotional over principles and words of liberation like the ones he’d heard as a boy at his father’s meetings. He thought that what he really wanted was to leave Spain: with no preparation, notification, or remorse, to put distance between himself and his country, get on a night express next to Judith Biely and wake in a port city where he’d sail that same day on a ship for America, disappear without a trace, free of any connection, as separated from the outside world and all the anguished obligations in his life as when he embraced her after undressing her and buried his face in her neck, inhaling her smell, as if he were breathing in advance the air of another country and another life, his eyes closed while the curtains filtered the workday-morning light, and muffled sounds of the city reached the brief, hired intimacy that welcomed them in the house of Madame Mathilde.

The next morning, when he arrived at the office, Eutimio bowed his head slightly and made a gesture of greeting without looking him in the eye.