In the Night of Time

19

HE’S ALWAYS BEEN about to leave. He doesn’t know for how many years he’s been a guest in his own life, the figure in a painting, the only one in a group to turn his eyes away from what holds the attention of the others, as if to say I’m not one of them; a dubious presence who appeared out of focus in photographs or simply was missing from them (mother, children, smiling grandparents, only the father invisible: distracted, perhaps using some pretext not to pose). You must have thought no one would notice how you hid your disapproval, but I did. I know you better than anybody, though you don’t think so. In reality this written voice is the only one that has addressed him since he began his journey, the irate, accusing voice, no longer hurt, only filled with rage, a rage chilled by distance and the act of writing, and perhaps, too, by the awareness that the addressee might never receive the letter, that he was dead, that the mail service, in ruins like everything else, had lost it, left it undelivered in some mail sack — how many letters must have disappeared this way throughout Spain during these months, how many are still being written? You always had to go somewhere, you said nothing and suddenly you’d tell me, at the last minute, I’m leaving tomorrow, or I won’t be home for supper tonight, or that time you went to Barcelona for a whole week to see the International Exhibition — for work, you said, even though Miguel had been running high fevers and seemed to have something wrong with his lungs. You left me alone night after night, lying awake beside the boy who was delirious. Don’t think I don’t remember. He could tear up the letter right now, get rid of it as he’d done with so many things as he traveled, from the time he closed the door of his apartment in Madrid and out of habit was about to lock it but decided not to; he probably wouldn’t go back and a patrol of militiamen could smash the lock at any time, that very night; he might have torn up the letter before leaving the hotel room, or better yet, not opened it when the receptionist handed it to him and after the initial surprise, then hope, and finally disillusionment he recognized the handwriting. It wasn’t Judith’s. It was almost worse when you stayed here and it felt as if you were gone because it seemed as if you weren’t in your own house but someone else’s or in a waiting room or a hotel especially when my parents or brother or someone from my family came to visit. I wish you’d seen the face you put on for them.

So many grievances, all of them cited in the letter as if on the densely written pages of a formal indictment, bringing him Adela’s exhausted, offended voice, vibrating and never silent in the receiver of a phone he didn’t know how to move away from his ear. Leaving or being left alone, that was all you wanted and it’s what you’ve accomplished. The man who’d been an intruder or a furtive guest in his own apartment became for several months its only resident; from the Saturday in July when he came back from the Sierra and searched for Judith in a Madrid inundated with crowds, lit by headlights and the sudden flare of fires, to a midnight three months later when Madrid was already a city of dark, empty streets, disciplined by fear and alarm sirens, seized by terror at the steady approach of the war, like the inexorable arrival of winter. Long before, at the end of July, in August, on hot nights when it wasn’t wise to be seen on the streets, Ignacio Abel wandered aimlessly through the apartment, up and down the long hall, from one room to another, opening the glass doors between rooms with high ceilings and moldings of an opulence he disliked more and more. He wrote letters; he imagined he was writing them; laboriously he composed aloud the phrases in English he’d say to Judith Biely if he saw her again; he wound the clock in the hall, and every time it took less time for it to stop; he didn’t uncover most of the furniture and lamps draped in sheets, which looked abstract now; he observed with displeasure how quickly dirt took over in the bathroom with no one there to clean it; he ventured into the kitchen to prepare himself a simple supper, a hermit’s meal, whatever the porter’s wife had brought up for him or he had found at the less and less well-stocked stands at the nearby market or the corner grocery that until recently had displayed a full window, now almost empty, in part because of real shortages, in part because the owner preferred to hide the goods in the cellar for fear they would be requisitioned at gunpoint.

How strange that he’d found an apartment like this acceptable, resigned himself to it, allowed it to be filled with furnishings as presumptuous as the dimensions of the building itself, the marble balustrades on the balconies, the drapes and rugs, not to mention the testimonies to the terrible taste of Don Francisco de Asís and Doña Cecilia, their terrifying generosity and love of fake antiques, or authentically abominable antiques, carved Castilian credenzas, the pendulum clock with its Gothic inscription in Latin, the Christ of Medinaceli with its Morisco eave and tiny metal lights. I’m an architect and I live in an apartment I think is someone else’s; I’m forty-eight years old and suddenly seem to be living another man’s life by mistake, he’d written to Judith in one of his first letters, stupefied to discover that without difficulty and almost without intending to he could cross in a few minutes the invisible frontier to another identity and another life, his true life. But he didn’t tell Judith or didn’t want to remember the gratification he’d felt when he saw the place for the first time with Adela and the children, who were still very young, and learned the price and calculated that he could afford it: a recently completed building in the Salamanca district, close to the Retiro, with a marble entrance where two caryatids supported the great arch over curved steps leading to the elevator, and a porter in a uniform with braid and white gloves who removed his peaked cap when he greeted the ladies and gentlemen. “This is a building of true magnificence!” Don Francisco de Asís had declared, his booming voice rumbling in the marble-covered heights, and he had felt a certain pride, fortified by Adela’s enthusiasm as she walked from one room to another, admiring the size, the moldings on the ceilings, incredulous that an apartment like this could be hers, almost intimidated, while the children got lost playing hide-and-seek in the back rooms, their footsteps and shrill voices echoing in the empty spaces. You thought yourself so upright and my father so ridiculous, yet you didn’t hesitate to take advantage of his friendship with the developer to get a good price on the apartment. You didn’t bother to thank him even though you knew we only got this deal because of him. On hot nights his solitude and confinement became as unbearable as the air. (The shutters had to be closed before turning on the lights, as a precaution against bombings, they said, out of fear above all of the vigilance patrols who shot at lit windows, no questions asked.) He’d hear gunfire, car motors, tires squealing around corners. He’d hear shouts sometimes when he was dozing on the sheets that nobody changed, in the bed he didn’t know how to make, the large double bed with a baroque headboard, where it was strange not to find the weight and shadow, the breathing of Adela. It seems incredible not that you’ve stopped loving me but that you’ve forgotten how much you used to love me. He left the bedroom door partway open in case he heard footsteps at dawn on the landing or the stairs (no one had repaired the elevator since some strikers sabotaged it early in July). He heard footsteps or dreamed them and woke with a start, expecting fists or rifle butts banging on the door. He dreamed about Judith Biely, detailed erotic dreams, more like relived memories, in which she turned into a stranger, her cold stare plunging him into a deep sadness that was still there when he woke. He masturbated without pleasure, with a kind of nervous excitation, with a feeling of humiliation when he finished, unsatisfied, longing for her skilled, delicate hand. He washed, trying not to look at himself in the bathroom mirror, and dried his hands on a dirty towel.

In a drawer in the wardrobe he dug out albums of family photos he hadn’t looked at in years, the ones Adela filled so faithfully, long hours sitting at her desk in the library with the large pages spread open, piles of photographs, glue, the scissors she used to cut small labels, the pen she used to write down dates, names, and places in the hand of a student at a nuns’ academy, with a conviction that seemed intent not so much on preserving memories as on building on unimpeachable testimonies a solid structure of family life. The albums themselves were a more lasting foundation than the events reflected in the photos. Classifying them, observing the regularity with which weddings, baptisms, Communions, Christmas dinners, birthdays, saint’s days, trips to the coast, and summers in the Sierra appeared in them, Adela precariously granted herself the comforting sensation of having the life she’d always wanted, the one she hadn’t dared to want when she was young and began to suspect that perhaps she wouldn’t find a man to marry, and her parents didn’t have much hope that it would happen either. The prospect of remaining single made her sad, but the generally accepted notion that if a suitor didn’t appear her life would be a failure seemed humiliating, an attack on her personal dignity. A man held his destiny in his own hands, while a woman didn’t possess so much as half of hers; without a man’s protection the only possible life open to her was to be a spinster or a nun, since Adela’s social class wouldn’t allow her to be a governess or teacher. Her tending so much to her younger brother gave her a maternal air: she saw herself in the role of proxy mother who hasn’t known even the degree of personal autonomy that belongs to a wife. On both sides of her family there was a wide selection of unmarried women, affectionate aunts who were resigned and pious and soon showed themselves ready to welcome her into their sisterhood, rather faded but not completely melancholy. An ancient cloistered nun underscored the family tendency to female singleness. Adela resisted accepting so premature a fate, but she wouldn’t have had the rare courage to displease her parents by telling them she wished to follow the eccentric example of those few young ladies from good families in Madrid who went to the university and endured the ignominy of sitting in lecture halls separated by a screen from their male classmates, subject less to scorn than to mockery, the whispered gossip about a kind of quirk that went beyond the simple whim of occupying male positions in life. Besides, what would she have studied? After so many years at the nuns’ boarding school, the only pedagogical outcome was an exquisite though completely anachronistic handwriting and a few inadequate notions of needlework and French. During summers in the Sierra she’d become fond of long walks and reading, walks that she wasn’t allowed to take by herself and books that had to be approved by her father or her uncle the priest. Adela felt deeply the humiliation of waiting and not doing anything, of seeing herself displayed on social calls and at family celebrations as a marriageable young woman whom no suitor approached, a parrot in a cage, a freak in a circus stall. But her feeling of personal affront was neutralized by love for her parents and a general benevolence or forbearance of character that made her go along with it all with little effort, preferring passive obedience to the discomfort of a scene that would end in tears and remorse and in any case wouldn’t grant her any result. The resolve of her inner rebellion never provoked the slightest turbulence in the sweet, mild appearance she presented to others, interpreted as a symptom of Christian resignation to the solitary future that with the passage of time would cover her in ridicule. When she was twenty-one or twenty-two, the cabal of her aunts and mother had already determined she’d remain a spinster, and they devoted long, laborious analyses to an explanation of this inevitable fact, which was enigmatic because somehow all of them had deemed it a certainty almost from the time she left childhood behind, with no obvious reasons to support it: she wasn’t at all ugly, or fat, or skinny either; she had pretty teeth; she was pleasant and considerate, though perhaps a little sad. She may have had a gravity that dampened her sparkle and made her seem older than she was, choosing dresses that weren’t flattering or that exaggerated her small defects, analyzed by aunts and female cousins with subtleties worthy of a class in histology, a science made fashionable by Don Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Didn’t she have a double chin from the time she was very young? Eyebrows that were too thick, a certain tendency to walk as if she had a weight on her shoulders which made her seem shorter? Among the girls of good family in her generation, she was one of the last to adopt the fashions that came from Europe after the Great War, and in this case not for fear of opposing her parents but because of something that might be interpreted as the negligence of a woman no longer interested in making herself attractive. In 1920 she was thirty-four years old and hadn’t yet cut the long hair appropriate to a woman of another time, another age, or given up corsets, and so she seemed to belong more to the generation of maiden aunts than to her female cousins not destined for the hereditary female celibacy that in the Ponce-Cañizares and Salcedo family endangered the continuance of the line. Her adaptation to the new age was gradual, guided by the caution and timidity that were character traits. At a given moment the compassionate tone used to speak of her in the family took on a hint of misgiving; her shyness stopped being attributed to a mixture of humility and sweetness and was suspected of hiding an essential arrogance. Not long before, she’d apologized for not attending as frequently as she should the ladies’ entertainments organized by the aunts, on account of her extreme social awkwardness and a propensity for solitude heavy with romanticism, and also — why not say it? — with sadness because of the love that didn’t come and the youth that was passing. Now it was known that on more than one occasion she’d missed a novena or a charity raffle not because she was home attending to her parents or caring for her younger brother but because she’d gone to a lecture or a theatrical performance with suspect women friends. The rumor that she wore glasses at home and read newspapers and modern novels was true, and she didn’t hide them from her uncle the priest, who was one of the first to make public her shocking heterodox traits: it wasn’t true (and no one who really knew her and viewed her without malevolence would have believed it) that she’d angered her father by acquiring the habit of smoking cigarettes. Nor was it true that because of modern influences her Catholic faith had weakened. She went to Mass every Sunday arm in arm with her mother, and accompanied her in prayers at the chapel of Jesus of Medinaceli, and confessed and took Communion with an inner devotion that filled her with serenity and had no hint of sanctimony.

Those glimpses of strangeness would have become the tolerable eccentricities of a woman trained for spinsterhood from the time she was young, but they were nothing compared to the seismic perplexity provoked by the great news of her engagement, which went against the laws not only of probability but also of nature. Who could have imagined that a fiancé would turn up when she was in her thirties? It would have been less unbelievable if she’d grown a beard, like those women in the circus to whom she compared herself in her younger years of meekness and humiliation. And not just any fiancé—though he wasn’t entirely free of suspect attributes, beginning with origins that part of the family surmised were undesirable — but Don Francisco de Asís accepted him more willingly than anyone, not because by this time he was prepared to consider any candidate as suitable, but by virtue of a good-natured lack of practical prejudices that often did not correspond to the Paleolithic obstinacy of what he called his “body of principles.” The suitor of the woman they still called “the girl” turned out to be an architect younger than she, without a personal inheritance but, according to Don Francisco de Asís, with a promising future, recently hired by the municipal government, the only child of a widowed mother, having lost his father at the age of fifteen.

The fact that the widowed mother had also been the porter in a working-class building and the father little more than a shrewd, ambitious bricklayer were additional merits, according to Don Francisco de Asís’s point of view, or lamentable drawbacks according to other family members who had the opportunity to congratulate the newly engaged fiancée and her parents as if really offering condolences, alleviating the vexation of having to accept in their cousin and niece a happiness they hadn’t counted on. It was a harsh obligation, from one day to the next, to envy someone who until then had been the recipient of their compassion, the drama of poor Adela who’d passed the age of thirty without waking the interest of any man. I don’t know how much you love that woman and I don’t care either but I do remember how much you loved me and I’ve kept all the letters you wrote to me. But there was no need to lose hope: the good news could still be undone; the fiancé might not be as honest as he seemed. Didn’t they say he was a Republican? Even worse, a Socialist, or a Bolshevik, just like his father, the late bricklayer who rose to master builder, owing his position with the municipal government not to merit but to influence, the machinations of left-wing councilmen avid to place one of their own. But as it turned out, the possible reprobate or dowry hunter had excellent manners, learned no one knew where, and a strangely mild way of showing, or rather hiding, his leftist sympathies, because from the beginning he fulfilled to the satisfaction of the most punctilious observer each of the family’s obligations and rituals, and didn’t have the slightest objection to expressly accepting that his children, when they were born (but wasn’t Adela too old to conceive, wasn’t it possible for a woman past thirty whose health had never been outstanding to suffer a difficult delivery or give birth to some genetic aberration?), would be baptized with the required pomp by the uncle who was a priest, and brought up in the Catholic faith. And speaking of ideas, hadn’t Jesus Christ been, as Don Francisco de Asís argued in a moment of polemical audacity, the first Socialist? Wasn’t the evangelical message — properly understood and applied according to the Social Doctrine of the Church — the best antidote to godless revolution? Besides, the fiancé’s parents were dead and he had no brothers or sisters, which spared everyone the embarrassing formality of having to deal with individuals of obvious social inferiority, whose presence, though picturesque, would have been offensive at an offer of marriage and more so at a wedding ceremony worthy of the family’s position, which would probably merit an article in the society section of the ABC—a modest article, of course, certainly with no photo, but everyone knew that in the ABC the snobbery of noble titles prevailed, especially since the founder had received one, though he’d begun his career as a soap manufacturer. Since when was soap nobler than cement and brick? Don Francisco de Asís asked in his stentorian voice. With no father or mother or close relatives, Ignacio Abel’s origins lost much of their vulgarity and projected a certain shadow of mystery, a dark background against which his elegant figure stood out, veiled by a degree of reserve behind which he could hide the memory of the years of perseverance and sacrifice it had cost him to study for a career and learn manners that were irreproachable even to the most suspicious and demanding gaze. In the eyes of the family, Adela acquired a new and on occasion piercing luminosity; from the first days of her engagement she exhibited an almost indecent amount of happiness. She looked ten years younger. The aunts and cousins said she was as mad with love as the film stars who sighed with their eyes turned to heaven and their hands clasped, glimpsing in the clouds the face of their beloved, thanks to an optical effect that at the time was widely reproduced on postcards. Think of how you called on me, the things you said to me, it isn’t possible you were lying. The languidly slow pace that had marked the progress of her spinsterhood gave way to a liveliness appropriate to the new age and the technical competence of the fiancé, who aside from his undemanding municipal occupation was beginning to receive substantial commissions, celebrated, not without some exaggeration, by Don Francisco de Asís, who at heart had always sinned on the side of naïveté and reckless enthusiasm. After less than a year’s engagement the wedding date was agreed on, and this speed, which wouldn’t have required an evil disposition to regard as haste, did not fail to raise suspicions, dissipated only when a careful accounting of the time passed between that date and the first birth revealed the undeniable legitimacy of the newborn. Adela, who seemed so sluggish, had been in a hurry for no reason other than to make up for lost time, with an impatience and a passion more suited to the heroine of a risqué novel than a woman of her years. But neither did she have any scruples about going to live with her husband in a small apartment in an unfashionable Madrid neighborhood where her only help was a maid. I do remember how happy we were even though I had to climb four flights in all the heat that summer so pregnant with the girl it seemed impossible I could swell up any more. Don Francisco de Asís let it be known admiringly that his son-in-law hadn’t wanted to accept the help he offered to rent a house centrally located and in better condition: accustomed to earning his living by his own efforts, Ignacio Abel was grateful for any hand extended to him but preferred not to have recourse to it unless required by a critical situation that endangered the welfare of his wife or the heir Don Francisco de Asís soon was proud (and relieved) to announce. For her part, Doña Cecilia, more stubborn or less of a dreamer, would have preferred that between the wedding and the birth a period had gone by that wasn’t more decent but certainly more dignified and leisurely and more suited to individuals who didn’t give themselves over to their conjugal duty with more enthusiasm than required to fulfill the purpose of the sacrament. I still remember, if you don’t, how I trembled when I heard you run up the stairs.

That a girl was the firstborn was a setback but not a disappointment. Don Francisco de Asís’s male child was, after all, the one designated to assure the continuation of the family name, and the girl was born strong, big, and healthy in spite of a difficult labor: during two days of anguish the worst family predictions regarding Adela’s advanced age seemed to be confirmed. But mother and daughter came through, and it soon was obvious that the rumors originating nobody knew where and spread by the malevolence of nobody knew who regarding the possible retardation of the newborn were without foundation, though the aunts on their visits looked at the cradle with an expression of condolence. The proud father, as they said in the birth announcements in the newspaper, asked Don Francisco de Asís to be godfather at the baptism of his first grandchild. Before the frantic scrutiny of the family, and the close vigilance of the uncle who was a priest and officiated at the sacrament, Ignacio Abel’s behavior in church was as respectful toward the rite as it had been on his wedding day, when everyone had seen him take Communion with exemplary devotion and kneel with eyes closed and head bowed as the sacred wafer dissolved on his tongue (reviving a childhood memory when it stuck to the roof of his mouth, leaving the strange, forgotten taste of flour with no leavening on his palate). The girl would be named Adela, like her mother. It was you who wanted her to have my name and whispered so in my ear. That the boy, when he came, was named Miguel, for his dead paternal grandfather, and not Francisco de Asís, was a disappointment to his other grandfather, but like a gentleman he rose above it, taking refuge in the hope, by then somewhat faint, that any day now the grandson born to his male child would be the one to perpetuate not only his family name but his first name too, and in the rather more solid prospect of his son-in-law and Adela continuing to expand the family, and if they had another boy they’d undoubtedly call him Francisco de Asís. In certain cases he knew of, hadn’t a change in the order of family names been authorized in the civil registry so as not to lose the memory of an illustrious lineage? In the photos of the baptism, he smiled as he held his grandson, though less broadly than at the girl’s baptism because he was concerned by the baby’s extreme fragility. How carefully Adela had classified them, album after album, from the formal studio photographs in the early years to the ones taken with the Leica she’d given her husband on one of his more recent birthdays, which he generally used to photograph works in progress. (It was the camera he took on his four-day trip south with Judith Biely, whose pictures he kept in the locked desk drawer.)

Perhaps Adela was slow to accept what Ignacio Abel now realized as he turned the album pages under the dim light of a lamp in the apartment where he was the sole inhabitant, and the figures in the photos took on a ghostly quality, as if they were people who had died long ago, so distant from the present, from Madrid in the shadow of nights of war (lit by the headlights of speeding, solitary cars that suddenly appeared at the end of a street, stopped with the motor running next to a doorway, where after a while a man would be seen coming out in an undershirt or pajamas, sometimes barefoot, dazed with sleep and panic, hands tied, moved along by kicks, guarded by pistols and rifles). Blinded by love, at first Adela wouldn’t have noticed his expression in the photos, including the ones he’d sent her as mementos when they became engaged, or the ones from their wedding day, or the portraits they’d taken together on a whim of hers in a studio on the Gran Vía soon after they were married, each seated in an antique chair in front of a painted backdrop, he with his legs crossed, showing his high-top shoes, she holding a book in one hand, her chin resting on the back of the other, wearing an indolent smile in which he could detect what neither of them knew at the time, that she was pregnant. On his face was an expression of not being altogether present, his glance fixed on a point in the middle distance, a self-absorption tinged by ennui. But perhaps he was mistaken, looking at the photographs fifteen years later; perhaps, lacking the imagination to see himself in what to all intents and purposes was another life, he attributed to the younger man a reluctance that became more apparent as he turned the pages of the albums. His entire life, watched over by Adela, by her fondness for keeping everything in its place, not only photographs but letters as well, each one he wrote during their engagement and the ones he sent during his year in Germany, arranged chronologically and held together by rubber bands, which he didn’t want to remove from their envelopes, to spare himself the humiliation of his own lies, the expressions of love in his own hand. You no longer remember how you’d complain if a letter of mine was late. He looked, hypnotized, at the photos, while outside he heard bursts of gunfire. He went through a series documenting his children’s early years and the tedious family celebrations, the changes in the face and body of Adela, who’d been more slender than he recalled. (But who could trust memory? What would Judith Biely be thinking about him now, erasing him from her new life who knew where, with what younger men, in Paris or in America?) He didn’t appear in many photographs (he must have been traveling, or working, or away on some pretext or other); in some he was present but wore an expression that separated him from the rest, resistant to the collective happiness, a celebration meant to bring them all together. In them Adela was almost always beside him, holding his arm or leaning against him a little, proud of his male presence, perhaps understanding later, when she put the photos in order and placed them in the album, or much later, when she went back to them to look for signs of what had always existed or to console herself for her loneliness and sense of deception and failure by reliving a time she remembered as happier: their early years together, the birth of Lita, the move to the new building on Calle Príncipe de Vergara, its balconies that opened on the unlimited expanse of Madrid—“Madrid modern and white,” as Juan Ramón Jiménez wrote in one of her favorite poems. Her secret malaise might still be a response to her husband’s work. He was so insistent on showing others his own worth, committing his very life to the completion of each assignment, perhaps uncertain about the position he’d achieved, wanting to prove that if he prospered it wasn’t because of the influence of his wife’s family, toward whom he displayed an increasingly dry coldness that hurt her deeply, especially because of the affection she had for her parents, her fear that her husband would hurt them with a defiant remark or sarcastic comment, or simply with the indifference that was apparent in reality and more so in photographs — even, she would realize much later, in the pictures from their wedding, and in those where Ignacio Abel held his newborn children or placed his hand on their shoulder on the day of their Communion. He raised a glass in a toast and looked away. But Adela hadn’t failed to complete her albums, to make note of exact dates, circumstances, and places in handwriting that was always the same over the years, as regular as her own presence in the photos, a mixture of passivity and childish hope, as if in spite of everything promises might eventually be kept, as if the only condition for avoiding disaster and not suffering disillusionment and even a raw lie was to maintain a serene attitude, a slight smile, raising her chin and straightening her torso, pretending she was immune to the bite of his coldness, that suspicions didn’t keep her awake, that rectitude was the best possible path. On the first page of each album Adela had written the dates it covered. The last one indicated only the beginning, September 1935. In the photos, Ignacio Abel saw not what was captured by the camera but what was already happening elsewhere and in secret: Adela, the girl, and himself on the evening of his talk at the Student Residence; the family party in the house in the Sierra on Don Francisco de Asís’s saint’s day. The first photograph had been taken a few minutes after he’d seen her at close range and heard for the first time the name of Judith Biely. In the second he searched for the traces of Judith’s memory he invoked while someone snapped the picture: the long table filled with people and plates of food, the warm sun of an October afternoon, the already remote faces, the family life that seemed a life sentence then, and now had disappeared without a trace: Don Francisco de Asís, Doña Cecilia, the maiden aunts, smiling and faded, infantilized by spinsterhood and old age, the uncle who was a priest, stuffed inside his cassock (what had happened to him — he might have had time to hide if the outbreak of the war caught him in Madrid, or he might be lying in some ditch, rotting in the sun and covered with flies), his brother-in-law Víctor, his face clouded with grievance, his two children, Lita smiling happily at the camera and Miguel fragile and shy, and Adela, near them, a woman suddenly mature, older-looking and wider in that photo than in his memory, leaning toward him, her husband, an attitude that survives the irreversible changes in her state of mind, as if her body hadn’t learned what her mind knew, that the physical support sought and seemingly found is by now illusory, that things have changed though appearances remain the same. And he, in a corner, smiling this time, not on guard or absent, as in most of the photographs, with an idle smile, visible despite the shadow that covers half his face, a little sleepy from the food and wine and the sweet autumn sun. Had Adela been able to see (when she looked at it slowly after pasting it in the album, smoothing it with the palm of her hand, writing the date and place on a tag beneath it) that in the photo her husband already wore the face of his deceit, that the ease and affection he displayed and she was so grateful for were symptoms not of the return of love but of its loss? There was another photograph in the album that wasn’t pasted in and had no indication on the back of the day and place; it had been taken that same evening, beside the pond of the abandoned irrigation ditch. Miguel and Adela had argued about the Leica, and it was Miguel who in the end prevailed, but Ignacio Abel didn’t recall the moment the boy took the picture, hiding perhaps in the pines, pretending he was an international reporter, a blurred photo, perhaps because there wasn’t enough light, or because Miguel didn’t hold the camera steady: his parents sitting on the grass, close to the pond’s edge, leaning toward each other, absorbed in a conversation Ignacio Abel doesn’t remember, the two figures as calm as the water where they were partially reflected, obscured by the oblique shadow of the pines.