In the Night of Time

17

TIME ON OUR HANDS, said Judith before hanging up the phone, confirming the time they would meet, the start of the trip, an almost dreamed-of flight, so there would be no possible doubt or confusion, and he liked the poetry implicit in the common expression, as he did so often when he learned a new turn of phrase in English from Judith or explained a Spanish one to her. Time on our hands, for once overflowing cupped hands like cool water from a powerful tap where someone who can finally satisfy his thirst will joyfully plunge his face or wet his lips; whole days and nights exclusively theirs, not shared with anyone, not contaminated by the indignity of hiding, not measured out in minutes or hours, a treasure of time whose magnitude was difficult for them to imagine. But what they couldn’t imagine at all was the two of them away from Madrid, in a setting other than the city that had brought them together and imprisoned them, subjecting them to the curse of secrecy, lies, and never enough time. Time on our hands, he recalls now, repeating it in a soft voice, looking at his hands inert on his thighs, on the raincoat he didn’t take off when he boarded the train, hands good for nothing except patting his pockets in search of some document or rubbing his face each morning after shaving, clutching the sweat-darkened handle of his suitcase, fastening buttons or discovering that a button has fallen off and left only vestiges of thread, or his shoelaces are fraying, or the right pocket of his jacket is coming loose. At least we had that, he thinks, that gift, not the anticipation of something that would come later but almost a final favor before the inevitable occurred, four whole days, from Thursday to Sunday, the straight white highway unfurling before the car when they left Madrid for the south while dawn was breaking, and at the end of their journey the house on the sand escarpment, the smell of the Atlantic coming in as forcefully as the smell of the Hudson comes in now through the train window: hands filled with time, with the craving proximity of the other, undressing each other as soon as they took a few steps inside the dark of the house, not opening a window, not taking the bags out of the car, exhausted after so many hours on the road and still aching with desire, incapable of putting it off any longer. It wasn’t the same as saying tiempo de sobra: no matter how much time they had, it would never be more than enough, not even by a minute, and in any case those words didn’t express the physical sensation of an undeserved abundance that fills your hands, like the coins or diamonds of a fairy-tale treasure, tiempo a manos llenas. Hands full of time, but no matter how tightly you squeeze your fingers and press together your hands curved like a bowl, water will always escape, time trickling away second by second like tiny grains of sand, gleaming like crystals in the morning light on the beach they walked together, not seeing anyone for its entire length, sole survivors of a cataclysm that had left them alone in the world, fugitives from everything, from their lives and the names that identified them with those lives, renegades from any tie or loyalty — parents, children, spouses, friends, obligations, principles — other than the ones that joined the two of them, apostates from any belief.

If at least you’d had real courage, he thinks now, looking at his two empty hands, hands with sinuous veins and badly trimmed, slightly dirty nails, if you’d dared a real apostasy and not a semblance, a real flight and not a fiction. Even the four days now fading away into nothingness for the lovers who until then hadn’t been able to spend more than a few hours together, hadn’t known what it meant to open one’s eyes at the first light of day and find each other, to be present at the other’s contented sleep and waking. Always so little time, the hours numbered, falling away into the sand of fleeting minutes and seconds, the timepiece ticking, the noisy mechanism in the alarm clock on the night table or the subtler one on his wrist, attached to it as if it were a pillory, second by second, the tiny jaws undermining the houses of time where they hid to be together, their secret refuges almost always precarious, always in danger of being invaded, no matter how deep they wanted to hide, one beside the other and one in the other, canceling the outside world in the single-mindedness of an embrace with eyes closed. Footsteps in the hall of the house of assignation, doors that at any moment might open, voices on the other side of thin walls, the moans of other lovers, inhabitants like them of the secret city, the submerged, venal Madrid of reserved booths, rooms rented by the hour, parks at night, the sordid border territory where adultery and prostitution came together. They lived besieged by creditors, by thieves and beggars of time, by greedy moneylenders and shady traffickers in hours. Time phosphoresced on the hands of the alarm clock on the night table in the room at Madame Mathilde’s, in the low light of curtains drawn in the middle of the morning. The ticktock sounded like a taxi meter: if they were late by only a few minutes in leaving the rented room, they’d hear footsteps in the hall and knocks on the door; if they wanted more time they’d have to buy it at a higher rate. Time fled in numerical spasms like distance on the car’s odometer while they traveled south as if they never had to return. The time of each wait dilated and even halted because of uncertainty, anguish that the other wouldn’t appear. The lightning flash of arrival abolished for a few minutes the passage of time, leaving it suspended in an illusion of abundance. Illicit time had to be purchased minute by minute, obtained like a dose of opium or morphine. The scant wealth of time was lost waiting for a taxi, traveling endlessly in a very slow streetcar, driving in traffic, dialing a number on the phone and waiting for the wheel to return to its point of departure in order to dial the next one: how much time wasted waiting for an answer, listening to a bell that rings on the other end in an empty room, growing impatient because an operator takes a long time to answer or transfer a call, fingers restless as they drum on a table, his eyes vigilant in case someone approaches from the end of the hall, a hemorrhaging of time, drop by drop or in a gush. It was Philip Van Doren who gave them the four days when he offered them the house he’d bought or was about to buy on the Cádiz coast without even seeing it, knowing it only from plans and photographs. He seemed to take pleasure in sheltering them, urging them toward each other from a benevolent distance, intervening in the name of chance, as he’d done when he left them alone in his study that October afternoon. The house of time Ignacio Abel wanted to build so that only Judith and he would live in it really existed for only four days, between Thursday afternoon and the small hours of Monday: white, with cubic volumes, outlined in a horizontal on an escarpment, its forms variable in the photos Van Doren spread before him on the tablecloth at the Ritz where he’d invited them to dinner, in a reserved booth, implicitly acknowledging the advantage to Ignacio Abel of not being seen in public with his lover, while from the street, from the Plaza de Neptuno, came the muffled sounds of a battle with stones and bullets between Assault Guards and striking construction workers — whistles, breaking glass, sirens. He’d pushed the cuffs of his sweater away from his wrists with impatient gestures and placed the photos on the table as in a card game, raising his depilated eyebrows, puffing with delight on a Havana cigar, a smile on his fleshy lips, his too-small mouth, incongruous with his heavy square jaw and hairy fingers. “My dear Professor Abel, don’t feel obliged to say no. I’m not doing you a favor, I’m requesting your professional opinion, asking you for a report on a painting before I buy it. Look at the house and tell me its condition. Live in it for a few days. They assure me it’s fully stocked, but I don’t believe anyone’s lived in it yet. A German acquaintance of mine, loaded with money, had it built, and now he’s not sure it’s a good idea for him to go on living and doing business in Spain. I presume to imagine that Judith wouldn’t mind accompanying you. It’ll be good for you to escape the heat in Madrid and the more suffocating political climate. Now that there’s another strike, it won’t be prudent for you to be seen arriving every morning at University City. Do you believe the military will finally rebel, Professor Abel? Or that the left will move forward with a new dress rehearsal for a Bolshevik revolution? Or will everybody take a summer vacation and then nothing will happen, as the minister of communications told me just a few days ago?”

Give me time. If I had time. It’s a question of time. We’re still in time. We’re out of time. In the reserved booth at the Ritz, Philip Van Doren looked at them with the magnanimity of a potentate, an oligarch of time, offering them the tempting and perhaps humiliating alms of what they most desired, so powerful he didn’t ask anything in return, not even gratitude, perhaps only the spectacle of the penury he detected in them, the subtle way in which hidden sexual passion debased them, consumed them, like respectable people subject to a secret addiction, morphine or alcohol, reaching the point where their deterioration becomes visible. I need time. How much more time do you want me to give you? Time like a solid block of calendar pages, each day an imperceptible sheet of paper, a number in red or black, the name of a weekday. Judith Biely, foreign and distinctive, inexplicably his, searching for his foot under the table as she smiled, raising the glass of wine to her lips, playing footsie, she had taught him to say. Time slow, fossilized, bogged down, solemn in the pendulum clock at the end of the hall, the one Ignacio Abel sees as he stands waiting, clutching the telephone receiver, impatient, the clock that strikes the hours with bronze resonances in the midst of his insomnia, in the dark expanse of the apartment, when he thought an eternity had gone by and he counts the strokes and it’s only two in the morning, his face against the pillow and the racing heartbeat, the rhythmic surges of blood in his temples, while Adela sleeps beside him, or is awake and pretends to be asleep just as he does, and also knows he’s not sleeping, the two of them motionless, not touching, not saying anything, their two minds physically as close as their bodies yet remote from each other, hermetic, submerged in the same disquiet, the identical agony of time. Time that doesn’t pass, as crushing as a burden, a trunk or a slab of stone. Time at dinner, when the four of them fall silent and hear only the sound of the spoon scraping against the china soup bowl and the noise Miguel makes eating it and the small thump of the heel of his shoe against the floor. The time I have left before the deadline for requesting a leave at University City or applying for a visa at the American embassy. The exquisite time Judith takes to come when he’s known how to caress her, attentive to her with his five senses, Judith’s half-open mouth, her eyes closed, breathing through her nose, her long naked body tensing, the palms of her hands on his thighs, her jaw tensing as she is about to climax. The time that always comes to an end, although the fervor of their meeting made it seem unlimited at first. Knotting his tie in front of the mirror, a quick comb through his hair, Judith sitting on the bed and pulling on her stockings, observing his hurry, his subtle gesture when he consults his watch. The time of returning in a taxi or Ignacio Abel’s car, both of them suddenly silent, far apart in the silence, already fallen back into the distance that does not separate them yet, looking through the window at illuminated clocks against the night sky of Madrid that indicate an hour always too late for him (but he doesn’t think about the other time waiting for her when she goes into her room at the pensión and looks at the typewriter where she hasn’t written anything for so long, the letters from her mother that she answers only now and then, suppressing a part of her life in Madrid, inventing in order not to tell her she’s become a married man’s lover). The time it takes for the sereno to appear after the echoing claps that call him in the nocturnal silence of Calle Príncipe de Vergara, more and more distressing, like guilt nipping at his heels; the time that goes by until the elevator arrives and then ascends very slowly and he looks at his watch again and thinks with disbelief that by now Adela must be asleep and won’t notice the smell of tobacco and another woman’s perfume, the crude odor of sex; the time for getting out on the landing, trying to prevent his footsteps from sounding too loud on the marble in the corridor, looking for the key in his pocket and making it turn in the lock, hoping no light is on in the apartment except for the altar of Our Father Jesus of Medinaceli with its small eave and two tiny electric lamps. Time will tell. Time heals. The time has come to save Spain from her ancestral enemies. The time of glory will return. If the government really intended to do it, it would still have time to head off the military conspiracy. Victorious Banners will return. I truly hope time does not pass. The Time of Our Patience Has Run Out. It is no longer the Time for Compromises or Vagueness with the Enemies of Spain. The time I have lost doing nothing, leaving urgent decisions for another day or the next few hours, imagining that passivity will make time resolve matters on its own. The time left before Judith decides to return to America or receives a job offer or simply goes to another European city less provincial and more stable, where there’s no shooting in the streets and the papers don’t publish front-page articles on political crimes. The weeks, the days, perhaps, to wait before the explosion of the military uprising everyone talks about, with suicidal fatalism, with impatience for the disaster, the social revolution, the apocalypse, whatever it may be, to finally happen, anything but this time of waiting, seeing funerals go by with coffins draped in flags, carried on the shoulders of comrades with a praetorian air, in red shirts or navy-blue shirts and military leather straps, raising open hands or clenched fists, shouting slogans, “Long live”s and “Death to”s, taking hours to reach the cemetery. The time it takes a letter recently dropped in a box to be picked up and sorted, canceled, delivered to the address indicated on the envelope; the time it takes each morning for the slow, servile clerk to distribute the mail, moving among the typists’ and draftsmen’s tables with the tray in his hands, stopping with unacceptable indolence to chat with someone, accept a cigarette; the time it takes for his greedy fingers to tear the edge and extract the sheets, for his eyes to move quickly over each line, from left to right, then return to the beginning, like the carriage of a typewriter, like the shuttle of a loom, drinking in each word as quickly as the time it took to write it, soaking up in the trickles of ink the traits of a handwriting as desired and familiar as the lines on a face, as the hand that slid across the paper writing it. You can’t say no to me. Imagine the house and us in it, we can’t turn down what Phil’s offering us, I have a right to ask this of you, only a few days.

He looks at his watch and realizes it’s been a while since the last time he looked, like the smoker who begins to free himself of his addiction and discovers that more time than ever has gone by without the temptation to light a cigarette: a few minutes after their departure, when the train had just passed the George Washington Bridge. Time on our hands. He’s heard Judith Biely’s voice on the phone, clearly recognized those words, their temptation and promise, their warning, We’re running out of time. How little time they had left, much less than he’d imagined, than fear had led him to predict: his hands suddenly empty of time, barren fingers curving to grasp air, intuiting at times, like a tactile memory of the body they haven’t caressed for three long months, the empty duration of his time without her. Running without a pause, running out of time, she said too, and he didn’t know how to understand the warning, didn’t perceive the speed of the time already sweeping them away. How much time has it been that these hands haven’t touched anyone, haven’t curved adjusting to the delicate shape of Judith Biely’s breast, haven’t pressed to him his children, who run to embrace him down the hall of the apartment in Madrid or along the gravel path in the garden in the Sierra; this right hand that rose in a fit of anger and descended like a bolt of lightning on Miguel’s face (if only it had been paralyzed in midair, pierced by pain; if only it had withered before hurting and shaming his son, who perhaps doesn’t know now whether his father is alive or dead, who’s probably already begun to forget him). His child’s hands so easily hurt by the harsh scrape of materials, paralyzed by cold on early winter mornings and warmed by Eutimio, who pressed them between his, which were so rough, scorched by plaster. “It was sad to look at your hands, Don Ignacio. I rubbed them in mine to warm them and they were like two dead sparrows.” With these hands he wouldn’t have been able to hold the pistol Eutimio showed him that morning in his office, the same one Eutimio raised and pressed to the middle of the chest of one of the men who pushed Ignacio Abel against a brick wall behind the School of Philosophy. He remembers with displeasure the sweat on his palms, as debasing as wetness in the groin. Time on our hands: time’s not used up slowly, like a great flow of water that turns into a trickle and then driblets before it’s extinguished. Time that ends suddenly, from one moment to the next you may be dead, your face in the dirt, or after a meeting someone says goodbye, someone you will never see again. The time of an encounter that seemed like any other concludes and neither of the lovers knows or suspects it will be the last. Or one of them does know and says nothing, has come to a conclusion but keeps the decision a secret and is already calculating the words that will be written in a letter, words one doesn’t dare say aloud.

He hung up the phone and the expression Judith Biely had used remained floating in his mind like the timbre of the voice that after a few hours he’ll hear again, close to him now, brushing him with the breath that gave shape to her words, Time on our hands, for once not numbered hours, minutes dissolving like water or spilling like sand between his fingers, but days, four whole days with no goodbyes or postponed longings, secret or stolen time, unlimited, overflowing, receiving them with the clemency of a country of asylum whose border will open with just a single lie, a false passport of limited but instantaneous validity, a lie that’s not even completely false: Thursday I’m going to the province of Cádiz and I’ll be back Monday morning. The truth and the lie said with exactly the same words, as difficult to separate from one another as the chemical components of a liquid. An American client is thinking about buying a house on the coast and asked me to go and see it before he makes his decision. It was so easy and the reward so limitless that it produced an anticipatory feeling of intoxication, almost of vertigo during dinner in the lethargy of the family dining room, where time went by so slowly, time like lead on his shoulders, the funerary rhythm of the large standing clock, an ostentatious gift from Don Francisco de Asís and Doña Cecilia, with its bronze pendulum in the body as deep as a coffin and its legend in Gothic letters around the gilded face, Tempus fugit. “You’re always complaining you don’t have time,” said Adela, barely looking at him, attentive instead to the plate in front of her, conscious of Miguel’s anxious vigilance, of the knee moving nervously under the table, “and now you accept another commitment. You could have taken advantage of the strike to relax with us in the Sierra.” “I can’t say no,” he improvised, encouraged by how easy it was, not lying completely, using provable facts like the malleable material used to mold the lie. “It’s the entrepreneur who offered me the assignment in the United States.” But somehow the dissimulation trapped him: when they heard him mention the United States, Miguel and Lita broke into the conversation, interrupting him to ask if all of them were going to America, when, in which of the ocean liners displayed in the windows of travel agencies on Calle de Alcalá and Calle Lista, detailed models where you could see the portholes and the lifeboats and the tennis courts drawn on deck, posters of ships with high, sharp prows cutting through the waves, columns of smoke rising from smokestacks painted red and white, beautiful international names inscribed on the black curve of the hull. Like his mother, Miguel noticed his vexed, almost agonized expression, the contretemps of not having an answer prepared when the lie had flowed so comfortably until then. But Miguel didn’t know how to interpret the incessant data his attentiveness provided, transformed for him into a confused state of alarm, the intuition of a danger that was near though he couldn’t identify it: like those adventure movies in Africa he liked so much, when an explorer wakes at night and leaves the tent and knows a wild animal or an enemy is circling the camp but can’t detect anything except the usual jungle sounds, and the leopard treads silently and is near, brushing the tall grasses with his long, muscular body, or the treacherous painted warrior approaches, raising a spear, while Miguel trembles in his seat, pulls in his legs, almost shudders, bites his nails, squeezes Lita’s arm until he hurts her. He observes the muscle that moves in his father’s closely shaved jaw, a throbbing that reveals he’s irritated. “Now isn’t the time to bother Papá with those questions. He has enough trouble at work. Will you go by car? All I ask is that you call us when you arrive. You know by now that if you’re on the road and don’t call, I can’t sleep.”

Everything so easy again, after the minor setback, he felt almost grateful to Adela, and the anger toward his son dissolved, anger provoked by that anxious question, that excessive expectation he’d planted himself and didn’t know how to encourage or impede. But if Miguel’s expectation irritated him so much, now, after three months of distance and remorse, on the train that carries him farther away from his children, he understands the senseless hope condemned by its excess to disillusion, because it resembled his own too much, because the boy’s weakness, his nervousness, presented him with a mirror he perhaps would have preferred not to look into. He too was tortured by impatience to conclude as soon as possible the impersonation of family life at dinner; he too lived perturbed by desires he didn’t know how and didn’t want to control, dazzled by expectations that were never satiated and never fulfilled, incapable of appreciating or even seeing what he had before him, restless to have the present end as soon as possible and the future arrive, whatever it might be, any of the futures he’d been pursuing like successive mirages throughout his life, without age or experience or the habit of disappointment dulling his longing or chipping its cutting edge. Let the formalities of dinner conclude immediately, the routine annoyance of sitting down to read the paper, barely glancing at the headlines, while Adela in the easy chair next to his put on the glasses that made her look older and read a magazine or a book while she listened to the nightly concert of classical music on Unión Radio, near the partially open balcony door through which a light breeze entered along with attenuated street noises. From that balcony, if they’d been listening, they could have heard the shots that ended the life of Captain Faraudo on May 7. Let the children come in to give each a goodnight kiss, Lita in her pajamas and slippers, her hair brushed smooth; Miguel secretly indignant at the unavoidable obligation of going to bed, observing with his useless sixth sense that his parents rarely looked each other in the eye when they spoke, knowing that in a while his mother would walk to the bedroom and his father to his study, with the plans and models that absorbed his life, with the letters he sometimes wrote or read and immediately put away in a drawer when interrupted, the drawer he never forgot to lock with a key, a tiny key he kept in a vest pocket. Because he liked movies about Arsène Lupin and Fantômas (in fact there wasn’t any kind of movie he didn’t like), Miguel fantasized about dedicating himself as an adult to a distinguished criminal career as a white-gloved thief, an expert in opening safes, bank vaults, drawers in desks identical to his father’s that hid under lock and key what in movies and novels were called compromising documents, perhaps the stolen letters used by an unscrupulous blackmailer to extort money from a beautiful woman of high society. Instead of the books given to him at school, the Clásicos Castellanos whose dry backs stood in a row on Lita’s shelf, Miguel read the illustrated stories in Mundo Gráfico. The heading of one story made him lose sleep now: Behind a Façade of Apparent Normality, Family Hid Shameful Secret. He reflected on this with the light off, tossing in bed, bothered by the heat, upset at not having done his homework or begun to study for the final examinations that were approaching at a terrifying speed. At least his father was leaving the next day on that trip to the province of Cádiz and wouldn’t be back until Monday: the prospect of his absence filled Miguel with an unmanageable mixture of relief and uncertainty. His father wouldn’t be at the table to draw attention to him when he made noise eating soup or jiggled his leg, wouldn’t make his half-interested, half-sarcastic inquiries about homework or tests. What if he was killed in a car accident? What if behind his apparent façade of normality he was hiding a secret as shameful as the protagonist’s in Mundo Gráfico? “Lita,” he said, “Lita,” hoping his sister was still awake, “do you think our family is hiding some shameful secret?” But Lita was asleep, so all he could do was resign himself to the immense tedium of darkness and heat on a June night, the slowness of time, the striking of the hours on the hall clock that his father would hear just as he did, with an impatience that lengthened the waiting time even more and mixed with the fear of falling asleep and not hearing the alarm clock. It would ring at five, and at six, a little before dawn, Judith Biely would be waiting for him in the Plaza de Santa Ana, by the entrance to her pensión, a small suitcase in one hand and in the other her portable typewriter, shivering, her jacket collar pulled up against the damp cold of night’s end.

He recalled the click of the keys filtering into his dream, like a nearby noise of rain falling on tiles or hollow zinc gutters; he recalled dreaming he was in the office listening to the click-clacking of the secretaries’ typewriters. He opened his eyes and it was day; Judith wasn’t beside him in bed. Through the shutters came a ray of sunlight and the powerful sound of the ocean. He’d have preferred not to think so soon that it was the last day, Sunday, and that very early the next morning they had to return to Madrid. He noted his body aching from making love, areas where his flesh had swelled, the overly tender, damp skin becoming irritated and red. Electrical current reached the house irregularly. He recalled Judith’s body gleaming with sweat in the light of an oil lamp resting on the floor, a lock of damp hair adhering to her face, her mouth half open, turning to look at him over her shoulder, knees and elbows resting on the unmade bed. They taught each other the names of things, the ordinary words that designated the most intimate acts and sensations of love, the most desired parts of the body. They pointed in order to find out, as if they had to name everything in the new world where they’d hidden, and the exploration by index finger turned into a caress. New words, never applied before to a body born and reared in another language, childish terms, vulgar, shameless, sweetly crude, with a subtlety of nuance that acquired the carnal dimension of what was being named. They exchanged words as if they were fluids and caresses; Spanish words he never imagined he’d be able to say aloud were transformed into immodest passwords; it was enough to say again in order to request what would have had another name, less precise and less brazenly sexual as well, what perhaps neither of them would have dared to say to someone brought up in their own language.

The sound of the typewriter woke him. He was naked and didn’t have on his wristwatch. In the unfamiliar light, he couldn’t imagine the time. Nine, midday, two in the afternoon. Since their arrival at the house, time had expanded before them as if encompassing the ocean’s horizon and the length of beach whose two extremes couldn’t be seen in the distance that vanished in violet mist beyond the escarpments, demarcated in the west at nightfall by the intermittent beam of a lighthouse. As they approached the house, they’d passed a fishing village as horizontal as the landscape. From a distance he’d pointed out to Judith the beauty of the architecture, the white houses like blocks of salt against the greenish blues and silvery glint of the sea. On the beach, the rust-colored cliffs rose like dunes partially toppled by the force of the waves. He could hear them now, assaulting, undermining the base of the escarpments as gulls screeched and the typewriter clicked in the next room, the living room, with a large, wide window divided in half by the line of the horizon, where they’d found when they arrived an inexplicable bouquet of fresh roses. The interior spaces of the house had a mixture of elemental primitivism and modern asceticism: red clay tiles, whitewashed walls, broad panes of glass, railings of nickel-plated steel pipes. Ignacio Abel relives the smell of the ocean and the sound of Judith Biely’s typewriter, sees her in an involuntary, and for that reason true, flash of memory, absorbed in her writing, wrapped in a silk robe with broad drawings of flowers, her hair carelessly tied back with a blue ribbon to keep it away from her face. She types quickly, not looking at the keyboard and barely looking at the paper; the carriage reaches the end of the line, ringing a little bell, and she returns it to the beginning with an instinctive gesture. He looks at her more closely now that she isn’t aware of his presence. Her absolute concentration, the speed with which she types, the expression of serene intelligence on her face, cause him to desire her even more. Hair uncombed, barefoot, her robe loose around her shoulders, yet she has put on lipstick, not for him but for herself, just as she probably washed her face in cold water to be completely clear-minded when she begins to write; she uses the calm of dawn and the clean light that fills the house where they’ve been living since the middle of Thursday afternoon as if on an island, an island in time surrounded by the flat horizon of entire days that for the first time they’ve been able to share, as spacious as the rooms they walk through without being entirely accustomed to the idea that there’ll be no one else but them, no voices or footsteps or words but theirs, partially unrecognizable in a place where the echoes are very clear, the house where it doesn’t seem anyone else has lived or can live, so instantly has it become their own, made for the two of them as much as each was made for the other, as this moment was made, when Judith Biely in profile types on her portable Smith-Corona before a bay window, for Ignacio Abel to see the scene in full detail, standing in the doorway, desiring her again, waiting for the gesture when Judith will raise her head and notice his presence, seeing the smile that will form on her lips, the gleam in her eyes. A whole day ahead of them, he recalls, calculating, a whole day and night, and beyond that what he didn’t want to see, what’s there on the other side of the fog and the horizon of salt marshes crossing the highway in a straight line, the penance of Monday morning and the drive back, the probable silence, he driving and Judith lost in her thoughts, looking out the open window, the wind in her face, the hermetic expression behind her sunglasses, the residue of used-up time trickling out of empty hands.

Judith looked up and burst into laughter when she saw him as probably no one had ever seen him, dazed with sleep, unshaven, his hair uncombed, the man who’d been so guarded the first few times he pulled back when she approached him, as naked now as when his mother brought him into the world, according to the incontrovertible Spanish expression that made her think of Adam. Ignacio was immodest and even a little arrogant, with a male bravura he hadn’t known himself capable of, which had been awakened by Judith and wouldn’t exist without her. Only now did she have the feeling she knew him, now that he’d been sleeping beside her for entire nights, arms around her, breathing heavily with his mouth open, sprawled on the bed, the only piece of furniture in the bedroom aside from a full-length mirror leaning against the wall. There was a provisional air in the house that made it more hospitable. Sometimes they’d looked at themselves in the mirror sideways, surprised at what they saw, not recognizing themselves, uncertain whether they were the man and woman intertwined, examining themselves, offering themselves, wiping the sweat on their faces or moving hair away from their eyes to see better so nothing would fail to be observed, the mirror like the deepest space they’d inhabited and where there was room only for the two of them, the most secret room in the labyrinth of the house, with no windows or decorations, nothing to distract them from themselves. For the first time love wasn’t a parenthesis conditioned and frustrated by haste. When they lay exhausted and satisfied beside each other for the first time they’d granted themselves the privilege of falling asleep, wet, sticky, letting the light breeze from the balcony soothe their bodies, the open balcony they never stood on. The house was a desert island with abundant provisions for a long period of being stranded, like the novels about maritime adventures Ignacio Abel read in early adolescence. In the icebox in the kitchen two blocks of ice hadn’t begun to melt yet, as if someone left them there just when they arrived, the same invisible visitor who left the bouquet of roses on the table where Judith had put her typewriter. They didn’t see anyone during the four days. From time to time Ignacio Abel was troubled by an uneasy desire to go to the village and find a phone so he could call Madrid, but he was afraid his other life would irritate or dishearten Judith. In the shameless fervor of mutual surrender there was a seed of reserve, as there was a portion of exasperation in desire. Each revealed to the other what had never been shown to anyone else, and they did, or allowed to be done, what shame wouldn’t have permitted them to conceive of, yet there were regrets or complaints or silent outbreaks of anguish they both concealed. On the second night Ignacio Abel woke and Judith was sitting up in bed, her back to him, erect, looking toward the window. He was going to say her name or extend his hand to her, but the suggestion of self-absorption emanating from her motionless body, from the breathing he couldn’t hear, stopped him. What will happen when we go back? How much time do I have left? How would they let me know whether something happened, whether misfortune struck one of my children, a car out of control on the way to school, the horrible, always lurking dangers you don’t want to think about, a sudden fever, a stray bullet in the tumult of a demonstration? Adela waiting for the requested and promised call, the one that wouldn’t have been so difficult, the one he wasn’t going to make. Four days and four nights that would last forever and crumble into nothingness. He was leaning on his elbows at the bedroom window, enjoying the coolness of the night after a long hot Sunday, looking at the full moon that had risen from the ocean like a great yellow balloon, when he realized he didn’t hear the typewriter. He went out to the living room and saw with a start that Judith wasn’t there. Insects flew around the lighted lamp on the table next to the typewriter and the handful of pages the breeze was disarranging. She was writing an article, she told him, about the things she’d seen on the drive from Madrid, the beauty that took her breath away and made her feel she was living in the fantastic landscapes of Washington Irving, John Dos Passos, romantic lithographs, and the miserable poverty it was impossible to look away from. Leaving Madrid for the south at first light had meant becoming lost in another world for which nothing had prepared her, though she recognized its literary lineage. The dry, treeless expanse of La Mancha in the June morning, cool at first and then burning hot, was identical to the descriptions of Azorín and Unamuno and the color illustrations in a 1905 Quijote she’d found in the public library when she was fifteen or sixteen: the images made more of an impression on her because she barely knew Spanish and had stared at them in order to understand something of the story. But he, driving without taking his eyes from the dusty road, attempted to dissuade her from those dreams: she should forget about the Castilian ecstasies of Azorín and Unamuno, Ortega’s vague observations; there was nothing mystical, nothing beautiful in the bare plain those writers had celebrated, no mystery related to the essence of Spain; there was ignorance, senseless economic decisions, the cutting down of trees, the dominance of huge estates and great flocks of sheep owned by feudal lords, grossly rich parasites dependent on the labor of peasants crushed by poverty, uneducated, malnourished, subjugated by the superstitions of the Church. What she saw wasn’t nature, he said, taking one hand from the wheel, gesturing with an indignation that by now was a character trait; the uninhabited wastelands, the expanses of wheat fields and vineyards, the barren horizons where a bell tower rose above a cluster of squat, earth-colored houses, were the consequence of fruitless labor and the exploitation of one man by another that was blessed by the Church. The precipices of Despeñaperros brought to Judith’s mind the stagecoach journeys of romantic chroniclers and the fantastic lithographs of Gustave Doré; driving slowly along the narrow, dangerous highway, car tires squealing on gravel at the edges of ravines, Ignacio Abel spoke at length and in a loud voice about the need for the Republic to favor literary verbiage less and the engineering of roads, railways, canals, and ports more. Out of the corner of his eye he saw her taking photographs with the small Leica she wore around her neck. He attempted to dissuade her from the deceitful seduction of the picturesque: that barefoot boy wearing a straw hat who waved at them as he rode on a tiny donkey was probably destined never to set foot in school; the slow multitude of sheep that obliged them to stop and crossed the road enveloped in a storm of dust might remind Judith of the adventure in which Don Quijote, in his delirium, confuses flocks and armies, giving her the idea of a country halted in time, where things written in a book more than three centuries before continued to be real — shepherds whistling to their dogs, holding staffs from which bags of esparto grass and water gourds hung, their helpers using slings and hurling stones with the dexterity of Neolithic herders. Wouldn’t it be better if that fallow land the sheep passed over were plowed, cultivated with the necessary technical skill, turned over with tractors and not hoes, distributed in sufficiently large parcels to those who cultivated it? No doubt, when night fell, the shepherds would light fires and tell one another primitive stories or sing ballads passed down from the Middle Ages for the satisfaction of Don Ramón Menéndez Pidal and the scholars at the Center for Historical Studies whom Judith so admired. But rather than singing ballads, perhaps it would be better for them to listen to songs on the radio and have the opportunity to sleep in a bed and work six days a week for a reasonable wage.

Judith listened attentively. She had the gift of listening. She asked questions: she didn’t want to lose the meaning of any word, just as she wrote down in a notebook the beautiful names, Arabic- or Roman-sounding, of the villages they drove past. The urgent need to write revived forcefully in her; the feeling of something that wouldn’t resemble anything she’d done before, the attempts that almost never left her feeling satisfied but only regretful, because of her sense of fraudulence, of squandering for unknown reasons the impulse that had brought her to Europe, the goal of giving herself an education, of living up to her mother’s gift. The physical exaltation of traveling in a car next to him and of having the days and nights before them was linked to the proximate writing of the book that had appeared to her so often as a dazzling intuition about to be revealed; the audacity of love would be with her when she placed a blank sheet of paper in front of her and touched the round polished keys of the typewriter, white letters on a black background, its body so light, its mechanism so fast: additional spurs to the speed her writing would have, touched with a transparent sharpness, a clarity like the one she noted in her own attentiveness and alert gaze during the trip. She would have to recount what she was seeing with a fluidity that would contain the passing images and sensations: the dry plain, the blue background of mountains it seemed they would never reach, the precipices where torrents resounded and great eagles flew in slow circles, the straight rows of olive trees undulating as if on a static sea of reddish hills until they vanished in another, bluer, still more distant horizon. She would have to mix into the flow of the account the austere splendor of the landscapes and the affront of backwardness and human poverty, the dignity of the lean, dry faces that remained fixed as the car passed, motionless in front of white walls, looking out of shadowy doorways. As they left a village that didn’t seem to have a name, or trees, or almost any inhabitants, only dogs panting in the sun on a dusty street, Ignacio Abel abruptly put on the brakes, forcing her to look straight ahead. A hammer and sickle had been painted in large brushstrokes on the half-collapsed wall of a drinking trough. In front of the car a line of men obstructed the highway. They wore berets and straw hats against the sun, and espadrilles and corduroy trousers tied at the waist with straps or lengths of rope. One or two wore a red armband with political initials, perhaps UHP. Two of them, one at each end of the line, held, but didn’t aim, hunting shotguns. Yet there was no hostility in their eyes; curiosity, perhaps, because of the rarity of the car model, its body painted brilliant green, the chrome fittings of the handles and headlights, the folded-down leather top, the men’s curiosity intensified by Judith’s visibly foreign air. And a gruff obstinacy as well, the instinctive offense at the polished car in the gritty desolation of the village outskirts, the rage of promises never kept, the messianic dreams of social revolution. “They won’t do anything to us,” said Ignacio Abel, looking into the eyes of the man who approached and holding Judith’s hand that had reached toward the wheel, searching for his. She didn’t understand what the man said; he spoke with a strange accent, in a hoarse voice, barely parting his lips. There was no work in the village, the man said. The bosses had refused to plant, and they had decided that the scant barley and wheat harvest would be left in the fields. We’re not bandits, the man said, and not beggars either. So that their children wouldn’t die of hunger, they were asking for a voluntary contribution. As the man talked to Ignacio Abel, the others looked at Judith. She would have to write about those black eyes in dark faces, their chins unshaven; the toothless smile of the man who had the fog of mental deficiency in his eyes; the harsh surface of everything under a vertical sun; the faces, the black cloth of the berets, their hands, the barrels and butts of the shotguns; the anticipation of a possible threat; the way all their eyes stared at Ignacio Abel’s soft leather wallet and white city hands, the glitter of his gold watch. When Ignacio Abel handed over some bills, one of the men stepped forward and grasped his wrist, examining the watch. Alarmed, Abel sensed that the men’s request for a contribution was the pretext for a holdup. He didn’t do anything, didn’t try to free himself from the man’s grip. “We’re revolutionaries, not bandits”—Judith understood the words of the man who’d first approached, the shotgun now resting on his shoulder, pulling at the other man so he’d release Ignacio Abel’s wrist. He said it, she thought, in a joking tone, but not completely, a joke that didn’t eliminate the threat. She’d have to write about her fear and also her remorse at feeling it; the uncomfortable awareness of her privileged status, offensive to those men, and with that her desire to get away. But how could she dare to write that her abstract love of justice was less powerful than the instinctive physical repugnance at those men, her relief that the car was accelerating and they were letting them pass, staying behind, in a cloud of dust, in their desert poverty?

Though he hadn’t heard the typewriter for some time, he realized it only now. He called to her, her beautiful name echoing in the empty house. In the typewriter a blank sheet of paper moved almost imperceptibly in the air, fragrant with algae, that entered through the open balcony. The written pages on one side of the machine, the blank sheets on the other. He called her again and his voice sounded strange. The electricity had gone off. He looked for her in the house, holding the oil lamp, calling her again, noticing the seamless transition from surprise to anguish. She couldn’t be far, nothing could have happened to her, but her absence suddenly turned everything unreal, the white walls and the staircase lit by the oil lamp, the loneliness of the house on the escarpment, the presence of the two of them in it, the noise of the ocean. He couldn’t calculate how much time had passed since he last saw her, when he stopped hearing the typewriter as he leaned on his elbows at the window, looking at the white, sinuous line of the waves, the beam of the lighthouse in the western sky where red streaks were fading behind violet fog like embers under ash. He went through the rooms one by one and Judith wasn’t in any of them. He walked silently, barefoot on the clay tiles. In the kitchen, on the wooden table, was a glass half full of water, a plate with a knife and the skin of a peach. Through the window he could see the beach and ocean lit by the full moon, beyond the tall dry grass along the edge of the escarpment. Below, where the wooden stairs ended, he could make out, with great relief, the silhouette of Judith Biely’s back, her clear shadow projected by the moon on the sand, smooth and shining as the tide withdrew. He called to her, leaving the house, the wooden stairs trembling and creaking under his weight. He wanted to reach her and, as if in dreams, had a sensation of impossible slowness that worsened when he touched the dry, sifting sand at the bottom. He barely moved forward. He called but could not hear his own voice, weakened by the heightened crashing of the sea. Judith turned slowly toward him, as if she’d known he was approaching. The wind blew the hair from her face, widening her forehead, fastening to her slim body the silk of her robe. In her welcoming smile was something both fragile and remote that hadn’t been there an hour or two earlier, when she’d offered herself to him and claimed him with fierce determination: an air of resignation, as if that very moment already belonged to a distant past. Confused in his male way, Ignacio Abel stood in front of her, still breathing in relief at having found her. He dared to embrace her only when he saw she was shivering, the skin on her arms bristling in the damp chill of the wind. “Where will we be tomorrow night at this time?” Judith said, trembling even more when he hugged her, her face cold against his, her hips pressing against him. “Where will we be tomorrow and the next day and the day after that?” But if she’d said it in Spanish, the words wouldn’t have had the same prison-sentence monotony: tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and the day after the day after tomorrow.