In the Night of Time

21

SHE DID EVERYTHING carefully, not hurrying, as if putting into effect a plan she’d conceived long before, the only sign of negligence the disorder of the letters and photographs thrown on the floor and the toppled drawer with the little key in the lock, which Adela had noticed that morning, perhaps, as she supervised the cleaning of the study. The maids tended to dust inefficiently and to move things, and this irritated Ignacio Abel, who maintained in his workroom a peculiar equilibrium between discipline and disorder, frequently mislaying loose papers or newspaper clippings or photos from international magazines and later needing them urgently. She must have seen the key earlier, when the maids were straightening the rooms and airing the house, but it took her a long time to decide to open the drawer he always kept locked, and in fact she might not have noticed the presence of the key, since it was so small, a glint of metal in the study with its open balcony. She might not have felt the shock, or she might have resisted the temptation, at first not powerful, at least not conscious, not something that would have persisted like a thorn or a physical discomfort in the midst of the day’s activities. But she didn’t forget it, not even when she was absorbed in other tasks: going over menus for the next few days with the cook or talking on the phone with her mother — distraught, Doña Cecilia said, her body going to pieces, nothing but terrible news, decent people couldn’t go out anymore, couldn’t go to Mass without being insulted, and now they were slandering the poor nuns with that lie about giving poisoned candies to children, shouting vile things at the sisters on the street and threatening to burn down their convents. She listened to the plaintive whine of her mother’s voice on the phone but didn’t forget about the key. She seemed to see it, tiny and hateful, shining in the gloom when she lay down in bed with the curtains closed and the shutters open, seeking to alleviate a headache that became more oppressive on hot, overcast days, the gray light disorienting her sense of time. How she longed for the few days before the children finished the school year to pass quickly so they could leave Madrid for the dearly loved house in the Sierra, the relief of twilights and a breeze that carried the scent of pine and rockrose and returned her unconditionally to the happiness of her childhood, made not of memories but instinctive sensations, the singing of crickets in the damp and dark of the garden beyond the terrace, where the dinner table hadn’t been cleared yet, the creak of the swing where her children moved back and forth, bringing back to her, like an echo in time, that same creak and those other children’s voices, similar but belonging to her and her brother, so many years ago.

She had to overcome her depression, made worse by physical lethargy, to organize as if for a military campaign the annual tasks involved in moving to the Sierra (“The sooner all of you leave Madrid, dear girl, the better. Your father says something very bad is going to happen, and I ask him to stop reading the paper to me because you know how I get — I hardly have enough time to rush to the bathroom”): picking up the carpets, laundering all the linens, arranging the closets, waxing the parquet floors and the furniture before covering everything with cloths to keep out the desert dust of Madrid summers. But where would she find the strength to give orders to the maids and maintain the necessary authority if she shuffled around the house in a robe and slippers at this hour, her hair uncombed, with no desire to look at herself, no energy to scold the cook for playing the radio so loud, those commercials and flamenco songs resonating in her skull. Like the throb of pain in her temples, the little key insinuated itself into her conversations and actions. There were moments when she made an effort to forget it, others when she lamented the accident of having seen it and at the same time reproached herself for her curiosity and cowardice, her impatience to examine the inside of the drawer, her fear at what she might find there. But there also might be nothing to justify so much anxiety, and the best thing would be to sit calmly at the desk in the study, turn the key, and one minute later be cured of uncertainty and even allow herself a little remorse for having succumbed to curiosity and invaded a private place that didn’t belong to her.

She wasn’t blind and she wasn’t a fool; she couldn’t help but suspect, not because of her distrust but his typically male negligence, his inattentiveness to what he revealed in his actions. If he wasn’t there, Adela entered his study only to oversee the cleaning, moving with combined reverence and discretion in order not to disrupt anything, and at the same time act with invisible diligence to prevent the spread of disorder. She looked at things, examining a sheet on which something was drawn and putting it back in the same place, or perhaps imposing a certain geometric harmony on the objects and papers on the desk. (What envy she felt when Zenobia Camprubí told her she was Juan Ramón’s right hand, secretary, typist, almost his editor, that he read everything to her and considered nothing definitive, wouldn’t agree to have anything typed, until Zenobia had given her approval.) She put pencils and brushes in a jar, gathered together loose notes, visiting cards, pages torn out of a notebook, and placed them under a paperweight, not trying very hard to decipher the tiny handwriting he was well known for and that with the years had become less legible and closer to microscopic, though not more difficult for her to read. (It hurt even more to hear Zenobia talk about her exhausting duties — smiling, with her mixture of complaint and gratification, her light eyes brilliant, just like her light skin and American dentures — because Adela, too, had once enjoyed typing Abel’s articles and class notes, happy to help him, to do something useful that actively connected her to his work.) With caution, she preferred not to start reading, avoiding the possibility of learning something that might be painful; she checked the pockets of his jackets before sending them to the cleaner’s, trying not to look at what he’d written on some forgotten piece of paper, not wondering why there were two movie tickets for a matinee showing on a workday, not finding out whose phone number was written in the margin of a newspaper. What you don’t know can’t hurt you — it may never have existed in the first place. Curiosity was capitulation in advance, a sign of danger, of panic. Adela had been brought up not to question or have doubts about men’s behavior beyond the domestic sphere. You didn’t subject the honor of individuals to overly stringent scrutiny. If you did, you allowed and even encouraged an eruption of the indecent and the unacceptable, and once such a thing came to light, you couldn’t pretend you hadn’t seen it. Now the indecent was always on view in Spain, with an offensive carnality, and no one cared. In the daily life of an intelligent, vigorous man who didn’t intend to abandon other projects and was beginning to receive his first international commissions, a position with so much responsibility in the construction of University City demanded all his time. Since she had an honorable spirit and a passive character, Adela liked things to be what they seemed. Didn’t her husband always say a building has to honorably show what it is, what it’s made of, what it’s good for, and for whom? Some mornings the disorder was greater because he’d stayed up working until dawn; in order not to wake her, he’d slept on the divan, usually stacked with books and files of plans. Over time it became more customary for him to sleep in his study. The divan was large and comfortable; she made certain a blanket and clean pillow were always in the closet. Sometimes she was ill, and it was uncomfortable for the two of them to sleep together. From time to time, above all during this past year, he was so burdened with work that he didn’t get home until two or three in the morning. No matter how quietly he opened the door and moved down the hall, she heard him come in. She was awake, looking at the time on the luminous hands of the clock on the night table, or she’d dozed off and her sleep was so light the distant noise of the elevator woke her, or the friction of the key cautiously entering the lock. The footsteps approached; Adela closed her eyes and remained rigid in bed, attempting to give her breathing the regularity of sleep. He mustn’t know she’d been awake, waiting, mustn’t suspect he was being watched. But the footsteps didn’t stop at the bedroom; they continued on to his study. How clearly she heard everything in the silence of the apartment, how detectable each familiar sound, catalogued in memory: the study door opening and closing, the click of the lamp he turned on, the tired weight of his body on the springs of the divan. So exhausted, so many hours of work without respite, so many days without a break, so submerged in his concerns and obsessions: deadlines approaching, countless details requiring his attention, accidents at the sites, scaffolds collapsing because they were put up hurriedly and negligently, strikes, lost days, threats on the phone, anonymous letters in the mail. What else could I have wanted than to help you if you’d let me, if you had the confidence in me you had at the beginning and thought I was intelligent enough to understand what you told me.

More and more, what kept her up at night was the fear that something had happened to him. In the mornings she’d go to the balcony to watch him leave the building and walk to the garage where he kept the car. Some gunmen had waited for an engineer on the Lozoya Canal at the entrance to his building, not far from theirs, right on Calle Príncipe de Vergara, and shot him at the streetcar stop, and when he fell to the ground they finished him off in front of the people who were waiting and looked away. Zenobia had told her she passed the corner of Lista and Calle Alcántara with Juan Ramón on the night Captain Faraudo was killed and saw the pool of blood no one had cleaned, and people were walking in it, paying no attention, leaving their tracks on the sidewalk. Adela preferred not to think about such things if she could avoid it. What you didn’t think about didn’t exist. But she feared for her husband, almost as much as she feared for her brother, especially since the great fool had been reckless enough to start dressing in uniform and carrying a pistol. The telephone rang in midmorning and her heart seemed to stop. She heard shots or shouts on the street and the maids ran to the balconies with the same curiosity they brought to watching a wedding or a funeral procession. The day the engineer was killed, the cook came back from the market insisting she’d seen the corpse on the sidewalk with her own eyes, which undoubtedly was the reason she’d been out for almost two hours. “His leg was twitching like a rabbit,” she said. “Exactly like a rabbit.” But it was better not to say anything to the maids, because they confronted her, muttering under their breath as they went down the hall toward the kitchen: what does she think, does she think she’ll always be the señora and us the servants? People had no judgment. The maids and the building porter and the grocery clerk gathered on the corner and talked about people killed in an attack as if they were incidents at a soccer game. Ignacio Abel was late coming home at night and she thought about the daily radio reports of gunfire and assassinations, always incomplete because of censorship, which made them even more alarming. She was frightened by how casually her father and brother predicted that very soon something serious would happen; the country couldn’t continue sliding down the same slope, and only after a great bloodbath would things begin to be rectified in Spain. Those words, repeated so often, made her shudder. “Bloodbath” wasn’t abstract to her: she imagined the bathtub in her apartment filled with blood that overflowed and stained the white floor tiles. She asked Ignacio, timid about pestering him or saying something that might worsen his nervousness and fatigue, more visible as the months passed and summer approached, “What will happen?” “Nothing will happen, the same as always. Smoke and no fire,” he replied without looking her in the eye. So tired that when he came home he fell asleep as he read the paper, waiting for supper. So overburdened that after supper he went into his study to work on the drawing board or write letters or talk on the phone. It took her a long time to suspect him. She never imagined he could deceive her or take a mistress, like so many men. What she’d liked about him from the very beginning was his not being like other men: he didn’t smell of tobacco; he was always considerate with her, affectionate with the children, never raising his voice to them, never raising his hand (except that time in May when he came out of their bedroom distraught and saw her in the hall and said nothing, and the boy’s face was red and he was paralyzed, about to burst into tears, trembling, his mouth open as if gasping for air, just as when he was an infant and his crying stopped and his chest swelled and he seemed about to suffocate); when her father and brother, like almost everyone else, began to argue about politics, he kept his opinions to himself or expressed them in an ironic tone; he didn’t go to cafés; his life was guided by a single purpose; when he concentrated so much on work that it seemed the people and things closest to him had become blurred, it was a consequence of his vocation, which Adela accepted with melancholy admiration. When he was close there was, increasingly, a degree of absence; that this absence surrounded a nucleus of coldness was a discovery Adela preferred not to make. Her inadequate education as a Spanish señorita had left her with a feeling of intellectual inferiority, made more pronounced because her sharp intelligence allowed her to understand the extent of what she hadn’t learned. How could she assess the formidable energies deployed by a man of will and talent in the exercise of a profession as filled with difficulties and possible rewards as her husband’s, so rich in different disciplines, with room for invention as well as mathematical rigor, for the secret, manual shaping of forms (the drawings on his desk each morning; the small models the children had once played with), and the courage to give orders and control machines and teams of workers. A man paid a price for the privilege of immersing himself in action, of visibly acting on the world. Perhaps her husband hadn’t known at first how to calculate what he ought to be paid. He’d wanted so much to be named to this position. Perhaps only she, because she knew better than anyone the signs of what he struggled to hide, knew how much it mattered to him, though he feigned indifference; how impatiently he’d waited for calls that didn’t come, letters with an official letterhead that took too long to arrive. It mattered to him to be chosen from among so many architects, to have the opportunity to work on a project of an originality and scale uncommon in Europe. But also, she knew, it mattered to him to rank higher than the others: those who’d enjoyed more opportunities than he had, those who had powerful family names and took advantage of influential connections. He also made use of his: at the same time that he asserted his Republican and Socialist credentials to Dr. Negrín, he didn’t reject the help of his father-in-law’s friends, well established and close to the last monarchist government. Perhaps, at that time, not even he had realized the intensity of his ambition. Men, Adela had observed, were not perceptive regarding their own weaknesses, least of all when they touched on a certain shamelessness in the temporary suspension of their principles. Her husband’s principles mattered less to her than to him, so it was easy for her to observe his fondness for two or three decrepit members of the king’s coterie who enjoyed honorary positions on the University City Construction Commission and were old acquaintances of Don Francisco de Asís. The benevolent father-in-law, well placed in the regime whose imminent collapse no one could imagine, wrote letters, arranged meetings, celebrated with verbose abundance the merits of his daughter’s spouse. She observed her husband at close hand, saw what he himself wasn’t aware of, the eager gleam in his eye, his growing capacity for sincere adulation, the longing that had always been in him and was the cause and not the consequence of frustrated desires not always formulated in his own mind, much less communicated to her. What could she have given him, what satisfaction, not to mention relief, had she not been educated to be an intellectually crippled creature, like one of those Chinese women whose feet were bound from the time they were little girls.

If she’d been able to study; if she’d enjoyed the advantages awaiting her own daughter, advantages already there at age fourteen; or if she’d had the courage to go back and forth selling and buying and furnishing and renting apartments, like Zenobia Camprubí, immune to the opinion of others or the censure of her own family. How many times had Zenobia asked for her help in her popular handicrafts shop? She’d earn some money and escape the tedium of housekeeping now that the children no longer needed her constant presence. Of course she would have liked to, but she’d never dare. Her son’s not being brilliant or diligent didn’t worry her. Men eventually found their place in life. But the girl, Lita, it was important for her to study, to be confident in public, never paralyzed by her mother’s shyness, never submissive, not only to expressed orders or looks of censure but to the unformulated desires of others, the sickly need for gratitude through obedience, to know what other people thought of her. How she admired her husband’s ability to listen to other people’s opinions only to the extent it suited him. She’d seen him courting, flattering, at times humbling himself so much that it had been uncomfortable for her to watch. A man with so high an opinion of himself couldn’t acknowledge he’d behaved hypocritically, and so he needed to believe his own lies while saying them and forget them as soon as they’d been said. She didn’t judge him. If she detected these weaknesses, it was because she loved him. She consoled him in periods of uncertainty, she stayed awake beside him when he couldn’t sleep, anxiety-ridden because of the wait for a decision that was taking too long to arrive. No one but she knew how shamelessly Ignacio Abel had longed for his appointment, yet in public he displayed an educated skepticism about it. But the thing most desired was transformed before long into a burden, the trap one willfully constructs and then falls into. A man had before him so great an abundance of possibilities that any goal he chose would be undermined by his awareness of the ones he’d discarded. He always had to be wanting something; his enthusiasm and his disappointment followed parallel courses. To work at University City, he’d suppressed his own artistic vision: the projects he didn’t do or postponed were lost opportunities that fed his longing and didn’t allow him to enjoy what he was actually doing. His good life, what he’d achieved with so much effort over so many years, was more than anything the tangible reverse side of other lives he might have known. Adela had always feared this, the temptation not of other women but of his longing for things he cared about — above all because he didn’t have them or because others, no better than he, did — and his desire to visit places whose greatest attraction was his not having seen them. In magazines he looked at buildings his colleagues had designed and that he might have worked on had he not been mired in the endless construction of University City. He’d been invited to design a library in the United States, and not even that could please him; perhaps it wasn’t an international commission as important as the ones Lacasa or Sánchez Arcas or Sert received, and they were younger than he was; perhaps the confirmation wouldn’t arrive or the government wouldn’t grant him permission to leave; perhaps he preferred not to take his family and still hadn’t decided to say so, and therefore changed the topic when the children asked about the journey and evaded her eyes. But he always did. He didn’t look her in the eye, and if he did, it was for an uncomfortable instant and he didn’t really see her. She couldn’t give him anything he was looking for. What she’d given him in the past he no longer remembered. Perhaps he was ashamed of having loved her once, or at least of having needed her. He wrote his notes in a tiny hand and kept them locked in a drawer, just as he guarded his thoughts when he was with her and the children and for a moment his gaze was lost, or he nodded at something they told him about school without paying any attention, or suddenly seemed to remember that he had to make an urgent phone call or attend an unexpected meeting.

Lying down in the dark bedroom, in the oppressive heat of a June morning, she listened to the maids coming and going in the house. They must be chattering about her, how lucky the señora is, she can go to bed in the middle of the day with a migraine, after a bad night. Wasn’t it because her husband was giving her a lot of grief, and what else would he give her when she looked like his mother? Where would he look for what he clearly wasn’t getting at home? Adela was afraid of them. She saw with closed eyes the little key in the lock and saw herself opening the drawer, and suddenly she saw something or imagined something even more painful than the possibility of having been deceived. Perhaps it was not that he no longer loved her but that he had never loved her, had approached her because no other woman of the type and class he found attractive would have accepted him, had courted her with the same calculation and the same appearance of sincerity with which, years later, he flattered those who could influence his appointment. Perhaps the aunts and cousins, disappointed by the failure of their predictions of her spinsterhood and astonished that a well-educated young man, though poor, wanted to marry her, had been correct in their initial suspicions, diluted as the years passed but never completely discarded. There was no middle ground in his ambition for respectability. He’d calculated everything since the time he was very young, when he discovered that his father’s death wouldn’t mean the end of his education, but also that nothing would be given to him but the small sum his father had saved, which would allow him to survive until the end of his course of study only if he lived with an austerity close to indigence. He hadn’t allowed himself any weakness, any vice. His intelligence and tenacity brought him to a point where he had all the necessary qualifications but not the right to take another step toward the social position that mattered so much to him, even though he saw himself as a radical contemptuous of bourgeois formalities and had a wholesome resentment of a caste system he’d experienced firsthand, literally born and brought up on one of its lowest rungs, in a porter’s basement lodging. How could she accept that their entire life had been a deception? Adela got out of bed and ate something light. The telephone rang and her heart seemed to stop. Something had happened to him, gunfire or a bomb at the construction site; someone had shot her brother. The maid answered the phone and left the receiver off the hook. She’d said she didn’t know and would ask the señora. It couldn’t be anything serious. “Doña Zenobia Camprubí wants to know if you can come to the phone.” “Tell her I’m not in. Say I’ll be back this afternoon and you’ll give me the message.” Her friends were puzzled that she no longer attended the lectures at the Lyceum Club, that she never had time to go with them to the theater or concerts or simply to have tea in the house of Señora Margarita Bonmatí, who lived only a few doors down, or at Zenobia’s, which was closer, a step away almost, at the corner of Príncipe de Vergara and Padilla. But she went out less and less, and realized she was frightened of people, hostile people who shouted but also people she knew who were affectionate with her; she suddenly felt paralyzed, had a need not to be seen, not to look at herself in the mirror. All she wanted was to stay still, not see anyone, lie on her bed in the dark, but fear pursued her even in that refuge, her alarm at footsteps approaching or the telephone ringing, or her uneasiness that the children would be late coming home from school, or that night would fall and her husband wouldn’t have returned yet, better to close her eyes and not listen to anything or feel anything, not die but be safe from any shock. Afterward the maids would say that in the morning they’d noticed the señora acting strange, seen that something was wrong. She got up from the table, unaware that her napkin had fallen to the floor, and the cook saw that instead of withdrawing to the room where she embroidered and read, she went into the señor’s study, being careful to close the door behind her.

She left the house without saying she was leaving, without putting back the drawer that fell from her hands when she found the letters and photographs. Only a few letters were out of their envelopes, as if Adela hadn’t been curious to read all of them, or had the sang-froid to refold them after she read them and put each one where it belonged. The drawer remained overturned on the floor, the tiny key still in the lock. What wounded her most deeply wasn’t the young face and slender body of his foreign lover but his face in some of the photos, the open, cheerful smile she’d never received. Adela must have crossed the hall to her bedroom, where she dressed for the street, and left the house without being seen by the maids, who missed her only when the two children came home from school and didn’t find her in the sewing room, where she sat each afternoon, looking out at the street because she liked to see them arrive and make certain they crossed properly. This is how she’d once waited for her husband to come home, when they were both younger and he worked in a municipal office and kept more regular hours (she’d watch him arrive from the balcony, and he’d jump off the streetcar on the corner and look up at her). She probably wanted to avoid the risk of running into her children and frustrating her plan, if she’d already formulated it when she left the house and knew where she was going. The doorman was the only one who saw her go out, and he said afterward that he thought Señora de Abel was more distracted than usual and didn’t stop to exchange a few words with him, only nodding her head as if she were in a hurry to get somewhere, like when she’d rush out on Sundays for twelve o’clock Mass. The owner of the grocery on the corner saw her cross the street and wait for a taxi, raising her gloved hand slightly each time one came near, with the kind of distinguished timidity typical of her gestures, as if she were uncertain whether it was correct for a lady to be alone on the street and hold out her hand for a cab. She carried a handbag and wore a small hat with a short veil, a light dress, white shoes, short lace gloves. The heavy fog dimmed the shadows of things without blurring them completely: the shadows of trees on the sidewalk, her own preceding her. The store owner saw her get into the taxi, and after a while he saw her children coming home from school, pushing each other and arguing as they did so often. On a corner of Calle de Alcalá, at the gates of the Retiro, Adela asked the driver to stop. She gave him a bill and told him to keep the meter running, she’d be back in a few minutes. At the door of the small church where she often went, not to pray but to sit in silence, in the cool shade tinted by light coming through the stained-glass windows, there was always a blind violinist with a dog. When young girls passed, their high heels clicking rapidly, the blind man played tunes from operettas or the music hall; when he heard the slower steps of a mature woman and smelled her perfume, he put on an expression of religious ecstasy and lengthened the notes of Schubert’s or Gounod’s “Ave Maria,” leaning forward, the dog between his legs as if guarding the cardboard box where he collected alms. Here he stood in spite of the hour, at the door of the church no one else would enter until much later. “Ave María purísima,” he said to Adela, perhaps recognizing her footsteps or her perfume, and she replied, “Sin pecado concebido,” frightened by the gesture with which he stretched out to her the arms that held his violin and bow, and made a parodic bow, but it didn’t occur to her to give him a coin, she was so dazed, so impatient to enter the church and enjoy the benign sensation of coolness and shadow, of refuge, of quiet that for a few minutes wouldn’t be disturbed. She’d become fond of visiting the church because she rarely saw anyone there and the priest didn’t know her. The one in her parish called her Doña Adela or Señora de Abel and from time to time suggested she join groups of pious ladies in the distribution of clothes to the poor, or in novenas. In his homilies he thundered against the impiety of the times and demanded prayers for the salvation of an afflicted Spain. In February, on the Sunday before the elections, as Adela was leaving the church, the priest approached, holding envelopes in his hand. He knew she was an exemplary Catholic lady, he said, and that he could speak to her in confidence. It was necessary to render unto Caesar what was Caesar’s and to God what was God’s, that was the evangelical commandment, and the sole concern of the Church — the daughter of Christ — was to follow the doctrine without becoming involved in the business of this world. As he spoke, the hand holding the envelopes extended toward her, though not so much that Adela felt obliged to take them. But when the Church suffered persecution, wasn’t it the task of good Catholics to do everything possible to come to her defense? Now Adela understood and kept smiling, nodding, still comforted by the Mass and Communion, the black embroidered veil on her head. She, like a good Catholic, surely would be able to follow her conscience when it was time to vote in the upcoming elections, but who could be sure her maids, young and uneducated, wouldn’t succumb to demagogic propaganda, the charm of impious forces? Or simply, in their ignorance, in their innocence, they might not vote at all, depriving the defenders of the Church and her Social Doctrine of their humble but invaluable support. Adela extended her right hand, and the priest extended his, thinking she was going to take the envelopes with electoral ballots, but what Adela did was to gently push the hand offering them to her, barely touching it, leaning forward slightly, smiling before turning away, saying with all the good breeding her voice could hold, “Don’t worry, Father. We’ll all know how to vote the dictates of our conscience, with the help of God.” What would her priest think if he knew she’d voted for a candidate of the Popular Front, and a Socialist besides, Julián Besteiro, not telling anyone, not her parents or her brother or Ignacio, who hadn’t asked her; he probably considered it a foregone conclusion that she’d vote for the right. You believe you’re not as intransigent as others but you also think if a person has faith she has to be reactionary and even a little bit retarded. Now she sat in a corner of the empty church, in the last row of pews, after dipping her fingers in the font of holy water — the stone so cold, oozing dampness — and kneeling briefly before the Blessed Sacrament as she made the sign of the cross. Her body felt heavy, weak from the heat, her swollen knees painful. The church was small, without much merit, vaguely Gothic, built at the end of the last century. The walls, painted pale blue, had sentimental images of Christ, the Virgin Mary, Saint Joseph with his staff of spikenard, his expression of kindhearted nullity, his curly beard, along with a saint dressed as a nun, her eyes turned toward heaven. The largest image was of Christ crucified, before which candles always burned. She liked his expression of noble human suffering, of acceptance of the pain and injustice driven into his mortal body. She liked the name written beneath the crucifix: Most Holy Christ of Forgetting. She could imagine her husband’s sarcastic comments if he were to see the ogival chapels with their gold-tinted ceilings, the images. But she liked the floor tiles, like those in a middle-class living room, the combined smells of wax and incense in the air, the delicate shade that made the faces of the images paler and their ecstatic glass eyes more brilliant, the trembling of the lighted lamp in the main altar, above the probably false gold of the Eucharist. Hail Mary, full of grace. She prayed in a quiet voice, not asking for forgiveness but with the feeling she was wrapped in a melancholy mercy as soothing as the cool darkness. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. The evidence of her unbearable sorrow would be enough for forgiveness to be granted her. The only thing she wanted was for the calm and silence never to end, for the unrelenting sun not to wound her eyes, for the gleam of the tiny key to be erased from her mind, and for the radiance of that young foreign smile in the photos to disappear, along with the cheerful assurance of that handwriting, so different from hers, taught in the nuns’ academy, in which she too had written love letters many years ago. Rest was all she asked for, to free herself of an exhaustion so profound she’d need years to notice some relief, to sink into the forgetting that the crucified Christ seemed to want for himself, the forgetting that was the only absolution for pain. The words of the prayers came effortlessly to her lips, just as her fingers had gone to the holy water and then to her forehead, chin, breast. And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. But for now there was no rest. The taxi driver was growing impatient and blowing the horn. Each blast of the horn shook her like a scream. If he left, it wouldn’t be easy for her to find another taxi at this hour of the afternoon. With infinite reluctance she stood and crossed herself again as she passed in front of the Blessed Sacrament. She lit a little oil lamp before the high plaster Virgin — it had a faint dab of color on cheeks as yellow as wax — and dropped a coin into the slot of the poor box. The metallic clink inside the tin box resounded in the silence. Turn thine eyes of mercy toward us. She had to ask forgiveness for something, but not the desire to dissolve into a sweet darkness without memory: she had to ask forgiveness for the rancor she’d nurtured toward her daughter because of the girl’s unconditional devotion to her father, which had unjustly seemed an affront to Adela. To what extent had pain caused her to lose her dignity (it was a lie that pain ennobled)? To the extent of being jealous of her daughter, of feeling resentful when she saw her go out to meet her father every time his key sounded in the lock at the apartment in Madrid, or the rusted hinges of the gate creaked at the house in the Sierra. In her high-heeled shoes her swollen feet hurt. When he heard her leave the church, the blind man put out the cigarette he was smoking and stuck it behind his ear before beginning, somewhat tortuously, the “Ave Maria.” The driver, his elbow leaning out the window, his peaked cap pushed back on his head, saw her approach with a look more of indulgent mockery than impatience. Let him not talk to her in such a loud voice when she gets back into the cab, let him not say anything at all on the way to the North Station. She was opening the back door when she realized she hadn’t given anything to the blind violinist this time, either. She retraced her steps, opened her handbag, then her change purse, and chose a coin more generous than usual. The blind man doffed his cap when he distinguished the coin by its sound and made an exaggerated bow.

Two hours later, at about six, they saw her get off the train at the village station on the other side of the Sierra. The sky was as overcast as in Madrid, but the heat was not as overwhelming. The stationmaster, who’d known her since he was a little boy, was surprised to see her dressed in city clothes, and even more surprised to see her alone, without a suitcase, in high-heeled shoes that would make it difficult for her to take the shortcut from the station to the road to her house and then into pine groves after leaving the village. Some of the men playing cards and drinking wine in the tavern must have seen her too, the ones who fell silent and looked out the window each time a train pulled in. Though it was hot, the summer families hadn’t begun to arrive. The men saw her walk away on the narrow path past rockrose bushes — they’d just bloomed, with yellow pistils among white petals and sticky, glistening leaves — maintaining with difficulty the regularity of her steps on the pebbled path. They must have assumed she’d come to inspect the house before the family moved in, but it was strange for her to come alone, without the maids, and dressed in that formal manner. She stopped for a moment at the fence and didn’t go in. Or if she did go in, she came out again quickly, leaving everything the way it was, not even opening the shutters, as if she’d decided not to touch anything, not to disturb the tranquility of things kept in darkness all winter.

She continued along the dirt path, looking dignified in her city hat and the handbag held tightly in her hand, though it turned out that there was virtually nothing in it aside from the change purse, empty after she had given money to the blind man with the violin and paid the cab fare, and a one-way train ticket. The path climbed gently west, toward the slopes of pines and oaks and the pastures, separated from one another by low stone walls. It was the same path that led to the irrigation pond they’d walked to since her children were small. In the mornings, after breakfast, or after their siesta as the heat began to ease, though at that height it was unusual for at least a little breeze not to blow. The children at first held by the hand, then, year after year, running ahead of them, impatient to reach the pond and jump into the clear icy water. How could she not have noticed how fast they were leaving childhood? And they, Ignacio Abel and Adela, watching them from a distance, sitting in the folding chairs on the shore, in the shade of the pines, conversing more impersonally as the years passed. Persevering in spite of the heat, as if she’d shaken off some of the weight that made her walk more slowly in recent years, Adela followed the path — which became less defined in the pines, the serene endurance of things indifferent to human presence — distracted and at the same time self-possessed, finally armed with a purpose, clutching the bag in which there was only a ticket stub and an empty change purse. The Sierra air plunged her into her most treasured memories, into the warm waves of summers that retreated past the childhood of her children into the distance of her own early years. She reached the pond, and its motionless depth made the silence more dense. The light gray sky beyond the somber arch of the tops of the pine trees was reflected in the pond’s smooth surface. For a moment she thought she wasn’t alone, but there was no one at the shutterless windows of the abandoned power station. To the south, beyond the foggy horizon, was Madrid. To the west, between rocks and oak groves, she could see the blurred silhouettes of the domes of El Escorial. Not a single detail had changed in the landscape of tenuous lines and faint smudges of color she’d been looking at since she was a girl. She took a few steps along the retaining wall and stood still at the edge of the water, looking at her own image, her thick knees and wide hips, the light dress she’d never known how to wear with elegance, her hat. She closed her eyes and stepped into the emptiness, clutching her bag in both hands, as if afraid she might lose it.