HE’D NEVER SEE HER AGAIN. He knew it with the dizzying sensation of not finding a step in the dark, or when on the verge of sleep one’s heart stops for a second. He knew it when his longing turned to uncertainty as the train pulled into Madrid and he got off and made his way through the crowd on the platform, looking for the closest exit and a taxi. Judith had promised him a meeting, and he didn’t know whether it was to be a parting or a reconciliation. It hadn’t occurred to him that she might not show up. He desired her so much he couldn’t accept the idea of not seeing her after waiting so many days, after so many futile phone calls and letters. The Sunday afternoon crowd filled the station, young men and women wearing neckerchiefs and vaguely military shirts with large circles of sweat under their arms, feeding off one another’s energy, both sexual and revolutionary, chanting slogans, directing defiant looks at his tie and shoes, his obvious bourgeois status. His age, too, would have made him suspect. How distant he felt from those people who had invaded the train at each of the stops in the Sierra — distant not from their arrogance or political extremism but from their youth. He heard vendors’ shouts, train whistles, anthems, fragments of conversations as he walked past. Everything less insistent than the stabbing pain in his stomach, the pressure in his temples, the sweat soaking his shirt, the knot of his tie squeezing his neck. Boys in caps and beggars’ rags hawking the afternoon papers, waving the wide, recently printed sheets, black ink running in enormous headlines. Announcements of departing trains blaring over loudspeakers. Groups of police and armed civilians in the station lobbies. If they stopped him to demand his papers or ask him a question, he’d surely miss the chance of finding a taxi. Taxis are the first to disappear when there’s a disturbance. So many armed men, yet so few in uniform, rifles in their hands and pistols on the slant in their belts, red or red-and-black kerchiefs tied around their necks. The train was slow, it was already after seven, Judith must be growing impatient. With luck, if he found a taxi, he could get to Madame Mathilde’s before seven-thirty. Perhaps he ought to call from a booth or use the telephone in the station café to let her know he’d be late but was on his way. He patted his wallet, looked for loose coins in his pockets as he continued walking toward the exit. But if he stopped to call and the phone was in use or didn’t work, he’d lose crucial time for nothing. A corpulent, well-dressed man walking ahead of him, who’d ridden in the same car of the train, had been stopped and roughed up as they searched his clothing. A wallet and a handful of coins and keys fell to the floor, and a swarm of urchins began to fight over them while the armed men guffawed. The police, close by, watched and did nothing. “This is an outrage,” the man repeated, his face red, as Ignacio Abel walked past, trying not to meet anyone’s eyes. “An unspeakable outrage.” He walked faster, his heart pounding. If they stopped him, if he didn’t find a taxi, he’d lose her forever. Your whole life can depend on one minute. From a delivery truck that braked abruptly, fast-moving newsboys unloaded large bundles of papers. He bought one and glanced at it as he hurried out. The government of the Republic is in control of the situation, and in a few hours it will inform the nation that the situation is under control. For the moment it seemed it wasn’t in control of syntax. But perhaps Judith hadn’t arrived on time either. She’d be lost, like him, at the other end of the city, without streetcars or taxis, her walk interrupted by one of those armed groups, frightened perhaps. SECURITY FORCES AND CIVIL GUARDS CHEERED ON THE STREETS OF MADRID. But she wasn’t afraid of anything and was a foreigner besides. She’d want to witness everything and write an article about it. Or perhaps she’d left Madrid. Her friends at the embassy had told her that for a time it would be dangerous to remain in Spain. Philip Van Doren had invited her to join him in Biarritz at the end of July. How I wished we could have left together but I can’t go on wanting things I can’t have. Van Doren smiled and with a contemptuous movement of his hand dispelled any serious danger, as if waving away a cloud of tobacco smoke. “As long as they take turns killing one another nothing will happen. A Communist, a Falangist, a factory worker, a business owner. Catholic countries have a talent for eloquent funerals, the Anarchists imitate Catholic pageantry when they bury one of their own, and don’t they all talk about martyrs, Professor Abel? A well-administered bloodbath guarantees social peace.” He remembered the blood shed by the Falangist or Communist selling papers one May afternoon on Calle de Alcalá: the puddle, bright red under the sun, gushing out of a black hole. The blood of martyrs. To the last drop. The blood that will wash away injustice. He left the station, eyes lowered, his briefcase held tightly under his arm, the newspaper in his sweaty hands. No one had stopped him. General Queipo de Llano has declared a state of war in Sevilla. But there was no taxi at the stand. At dawn vigorous action will be taken against all rebellious centers. Time slipping away minute by minute, she sitting in the armchair in the bedroom, not on the bed, fully dressed, unlike other times. He’d never see her undressed again. The thought pained him. How was he going to find her — Judith’s blond hair backlit against a window, her figure in the large mirror in front of the bed, her legs crossed, ill humored because of the heat, tired of waiting. She must be looking impatiently at her watch, sorry she agreed to a meeting she perhaps didn’t want. On the esplanade in front of the station, where the afternoon sun beat down, there was a loud noise of bombs and someone shouted at Ignacio Abel, gesturing at him from a doorway. He dropped to the ground, not letting go of his briefcase, his body flattened against the burning-hot edges of paving stones, in his chest the vibration of an underground train. A little farther away, in the shade of a café awning, several people sought protection behind a man in an undershirt who aimed a rifle at the terraces across the way. They looked around as if they’d taken shelter in a sudden downpour and were searching the sky for signs of clearing. Isolated shots became bursts of fire, followed by silence. As if obeying an order, Ignacio Abel and the man on the ground in front of him stood, brushing off their clothes, the people protected by the café awning dispersed, abandoning the man who pointed the rifle, now in another direction. Cars moved again. A woman didn’t get up. She lay not face-down but on her side, as if she’d stretched out for a short nap in the middle of the esplanade. The man who’d been searched by the patrol in the station, standing next to the fallen woman, took out a white handkerchief and waved it at the cars driving by. His eyes met Ignacio Abel’s: recognizing him from the train, the man imagined he must be on his side because he also wore a suit and tie and was more or less the same age, and thought he could count on his help. But Ignacio Abel looked away, stopped an approaching taxi that had suddenly appeared, and urged the driver on. He saw the eyes watching him in the rearview mirror. He felt his face and found a little blood on his fingers, the sting of a scrape on his cheek. He’d hurt himself when he pressed his face against the paving stones. If he wasn’t careful he’d stain his shirt, the light linen of his summer jacket. He had his briefcase but had lost his hat and the newspaper. “If you hadn’t been right in front of me, I wouldn’t have stopped,” the cab driver said. “I’m doing you a service and getting myself away from the trouble. The way things are, they’d either shoot me or steal the car, and you can’t say which is worse. But I saw that you’re a respectable person in a fix and I wasn’t going to run you down…” For Ignacio Abel, the driver’s words evaporated into air like the images on the other side of the window, or the sensation of gunfire and lying vulnerable on the ground in a large open space. “… the same in ’32, with Sanjurjo, and in ’34, in Asturias. Things seem to blow up every two years…” The driver didn’t give up, looking in the rearview mirror at the face of his silent passenger, so well dressed he probably sympathized with the rebels and that’s why he didn’t say anything. “… around O’Donnell things’ll be calmer, but you never know. Just in case, I’m going up to my cabin and tomorrow, God only knows, probably tomorrow it’ll all be over, though to me this looks blacker than a storm cloud, what do you think?…” Words dissolving as Ignacio Abel looked again and again at his watch and was alarmed each time the taxi braked and seemed about to be trapped, surrounded by clusters of people. The driver sounded the horn and blows fell on the car; an open truck full of men waving flags blocked their way. He’d never get out of the center of town and reach the clear spaces of the Salamanca district, beyond the Retiro, the small hotels with gardens on Calle O’Donnell, which since last fall had been the prelude to his meetings with Judith Biely, the sparsely built frontier territory at the edge of Madrid where it was unlikely anyone would catch them going into Madame Mathilde’s house or leaving it, discreetly, separately, burning with desire, Judith’s eyes adjusting to the daylight after one or two hours in the dark.
The closer he came, the more afraid he was. He wanted to move time ahead and leaned forward in his seat, his right leg moving rhythmically, feeling on his face the warm air that came in the window when they began to drive faster. He searched for signs of what was going to happen to him in a few minutes, prophecies of the immediate future, possible outcomes. He enters the house and Judith has just left. He walks behind the silent maid down the dimly lit corridor, opens the door to the room, and sees Judith sitting on the bed, wearing her high-heeled shoes and street dress, as if she’s just arrived. He gets out of the taxi, pushes the gate, and finds it locked. He rings the bell, whose faint echo reaches him from inside the house, and the sound that had so often announced a meeting with Judith is now a warning. The maid opens the door, and before she has time to say anything, he understands that Judith hasn’t come. Panic seized him. A young woman, alone, whom he saw through the window as the taxi slowed down, was, for a moment, Judith leaving Madame Mathilde’s house after waiting for an hour. Her features dissolved as rapidly as the driver’s chatter or the blurred spectacle of a street disturbance in the center of the city. He paid quickly with a wrinkled bill and got out. At the end of Calle O’Donnell, wide and unobstructed, with an open horizon where the rows of trees and streetcar tracks and electric wires disappeared, Madrid was once again the deserted city of Sunday afternoons in the summer, paralyzed by a dusty heat that the rows of too-young trees didn’t alleviate, submerged in a silence of closed balconies. Without a hat he felt insecure and unprotected on the street. He passed his hand over his hair, adjusted his tie, brushed off his trousers. Madame Mathilde’s maid sees him with his head uncovered and a bruise on his face, shakes her head in disapproval, and opens the door. Each step he took was bringing him closer to the undeniable; whatever it was, it would abolish the torment of uncertainty. The gate opened without resistance. In the garden stood a fountain with a basin but no water, topped by a small statue of a nymph. As soon as he climbed a few steps and pressed the bell that triggered a muffled sound of chimes, he’d know what his ultimate fate would be. He wasn’t asking for a lasting future without distress, only a moment to look at her, hear her voice. He wouldn’t even try to embrace her; it would be enough for him to be at her side and tell her what he needed to say and hadn’t said clearly before. He pressed the bell. No one came to the door. The house wasn’t empty; he could hear echoes of a radio broadcast. He rang again and the maid’s suspicious face appeared in an opening between the frame and the door, narrower than on previous occasions. If she said nothing and led him to the usual room, it meant Judith was waiting for him. The servant wore a black dress and cap, and on Madame Mathilde’s specific instructions had no makeup on her eyes or lips. She closed the door and with the same faint smile and silent docility she’d displayed at other times indicated that he should follow her. He didn’t ask whether Judith had come; saying something would have risked frightening away a fragile hope. At the door the servant lowered her head and moved to one side. When he didn’t dare to look inside, the maid’s voice confirmed his fear. “If the señor wishes, I can serve you a drink while you’re waiting for the señorita to arrive.”
The ice had dissolved in the glass of whiskey when steps that weren’t Judith’s approached the door and someone knocked. He’d been sitting in the red easy chair by the window, not moving, or moving just enough to take an occasional sip, noting the gradual warming of the drink and the aftertaste of alcohol, watching the progress of nightfall. Like the ice in the glass, his anxiety had gradually dissolved into despair, into the simple inertia not of waiting but of maintaining the immobility of the wait, because of fatalism or reluctance or the inability to make a decision or do anything other than continue to sit, glass in hand, submerging himself in the growing darkness, occasionally seeing himself from the side in the mirror when he turned his head. He could have pressed the bell on the night table to request more ice or ask if there was a call, a message from Judith. But he did nothing. He simply prolonged the wait, putting off the acceptance of what in reality he’d known, surmised not with his intelligence but with the ache in his stomach, the pressure of sorrow in his throat and chest, the warning of the unacceptable. He continued to wait as if the force of his obstinacy would influence Judith’s actions and will. Unmoving and alert, he listened for sounds in the house, the silence of an abandoned place that didn’t resemble the habitual hideout of adulterous plans and sexual appointments of specified duration. He didn’t hear muffled bells, brief rings, footsteps near the door or above him. From the adjoining rooms came no heavy breathing, bursts of laughter, disconnected words, stifled shouts. Only the radio somewhere, broadcasting misled voices and music, announcements. And in the background the remote sounds of Madrid, beyond the sonorous birds in the garden, coming in through the shutters along with a breeze, a hot breath released by the soil and pavement upon the arrival of nightfall. Embers of light remained on the venal red of the bedspread, in the mirror, on the porcelain of the bidet and sink. In memory Judith’s body had the same spectral quality as that dissolving light. How wretched to have brought her so often to a place like this, not to have paid attention to the vileness of almost every object in the room, the vulgarity, the depraved taste of a bourgeois bedroom from the turn of the century replicated in a brothel. Her young skin had touched those shiny, threadbare fabrics impregnated with the smell of tobacco and cheap cologne; her bare feet had stepped on the rug with a worn pastoral scene; when she leaned back, her tousled head had rested on that wall with drawings of flowers and a dark trail of grease. He saw her astride him, her hair over her face and her torso brilliant with sweat in the reddish light of a lamp that transformed the working hours of a Monday morning into night. He saw her kneeling, still dressed, removing his shoes while he sat in that same chair on one of the days when he arrived exhausted from work. Judith untying his shoelaces, taking off his socks, caressing his feet. She raised one of his feet and rested it on her breasts, leaning over to kiss it. He was going to say something and Judith put her index finger to his lips.
The approaching footsteps made him wake from his self-absorption. How long had he been in the dark? He turned on a light and stood, attempting to straighten his tie and shirt collar. After a few short knocks on the door, the old painted face of Madame Mathilde appeared, an envelope in her hand. His sentence would be on the sheet of paper inside, held by wrinkled hands wearing bracelets and rings. No matter how much I want to, I can’t be your docile lover, the mistress you keep at a distance while you go on living with your family. It’s better if I go and try my best to forget you. Madame Mathilde inspected the room with an expert glance and immediately put on her affable face of discreet complicity, saddened now, the bearer, perhaps, and an unwilling one, of bad news. “Forgive the young lady’s confusion, she’s a beginner.” Madame Mathilde spoke as if she managed a respectable household with servants, and a good deal of protocol, a boarding school or strict social club where few first names and no last names were spoken. “I told the girl to let me know when you arrived so you wouldn’t have to wait for no reason. The señorita came this afternoon and gave me this letter for you, asked me to say she was very sorry she couldn’t come back later, as she wanted to, because it was urgent that she leave Madrid. Which doesn’t surprise me at all, considering how things are going, if you don’t mind my saying so.” Ignacio Abel looked at her in bewilderment, nodding, as Madame Mathilde handed him the letter. He read it sitting on the bed, in the dim light of the lamp on the night table, drinking a whiskey he didn’t remember ordering, facing the mirror where he’d so often seen Judith Biely naked on the red bedspread. If we can’t have each other without hiding and if I have to share you with a woman you don’t love but whom we made suffer and almost die, I’d rather be alone. Shouts and car horns sounded in the distance, military marches and announcements from a radio playing in the house, something he didn’t recall ever occurring before. The night air no longer moved past the shutters. Sweat dampened the edge of his shirt collar, tight against his skin, and instead of relaxing him the whiskey had left a throbbing pain in his temples. What good is it for you to say you were thinking of me if last night you slept with her in the same bed and this afternoon you kissed her goodbye when you left and took the train to come be with me.
She’d leave Madrid by train that night, he thought with painful clarity. While he waited for her, filled with impatience and desire, in Madame Mathilde’s house, Judith Biely would board a train at the South or North Station, on her way to La Coruña or Cádiz, because those were the two ports where ships for America could sail from, unless she traveled to Irún, on the border, to take a ship from the coast of France. Madame Mathilde had held on to the letter intentionally; she had let him wait to cover Judith’s flight, so he wouldn’t have time to go and search for her. I can’t keep writing in Spanish, so I’ll do it faster and clearer in English. She’d written quickly, knowing she was leaving, coldly resolved to carry out a plan perhaps made some time ago. I’ll miss you but eventually I’ll get over it, provided I don’t see you again. He folded the letter carelessly, put it in a jacket pocket — not ringing the bell that indicated his intention to leave the room, which guaranteed he wouldn’t cross paths with any other of Madame Mathilde’s clients — and went into the hall, where the old woman appeared before him, emerging from a shadowy corner as if she’d been waiting for him. “The drinks are on the house, don’t worry. I always like to keep a real gentleman happy. There are so few left and there’ll be even fewer if this business isn’t straightened out soon — didn’t you hear the radio?” Ignacio Abel almost pushed the obsequious madam out of the way as he handed her a few bills. “No, the señorita didn’t give me any other message, didn’t say anything to me, though come to think of it she was dressed for a trip.” She pressed his hand as she took the bills, understanding, almost maternal, bringing her painted face close to his as she spoke in a low voice. “And permit me to say something in complete confidence. If, as it seems, the señorita will be away for some time, and you want to fill her place, as it were, with discretion and hygiene, you only have to say so, because I can introduce you to a clean, good-looking girl prepared to accept the friendship of a gentleman of your distinction. It goes without saying that in this house the doors are wide open to you.” Ignacio Abel went out to the street, still carrying Judith’s letter in his hand. He saw before him the smile that twisted Madame Mathilde’s mouth slightly and the gleam at the back of her small, astute eyes beneath painted lids. Suddenly he knew. He remembered hearing the doorbell as he waited in the room, allowing himself to sink slowly into the darkness, into memories and lethargy: it was Judith who had rung and entered the house knowing he was in the room. Standing in the vestibule from where she could see at the end of the hall the door behind which he was waiting, Judith had handed Madame Mathilde the letter, speaking to her in a low voice, and then had gone, so close to him and yet resolved to disappear into a distance where he feels he’ll never find her, though he’s come to her country not to flee Spain or build a library close to the great river, but to look for her.