In the Night of Time

26

HE WENT OUT AND suddenly felt it wasn’t the city he’d arrived in a few hours earlier on a Sunday afternoon. If Judith had been so near less than an hour ago, he still had time to find her and keep her from leaving. It was night now, and the streets that went down to Cibeles and the Paseo del Prado were filled with cars and people. Windows were open and houses lit, revealing bedrooms and dining rooms from which came a magnified, discordant cacophony of radios, and silhouettes at the balconies. Suspicion turned into certainty, an accusation; a resentful lover’s rancor gave tangible reality to his suppositions: Judith had gone to Madame Mathilde’s house knowing he was waiting for her, had the self-possession to drop off the letter and leave, and the astuteness to speak in a low voice and perhaps ensure the old woman’s complicity with some money; in the pocket of the widow’s gown the bills he’d just given her were next to Judith’s. On Calle de Alcalá a crowd somewhere between boisterous and surly shoved him and shook raised fists and placards, waved red and red-and-black flags. In the background, toward the domes of the Gran Vía, a shifting light rose that had the drama of a red twilight. It smelled of smoke and burned gasoline, and ashes rained down on bare heads. Perhaps Judith had asked the taxi driver who took her to Madame Mathilde’s to wait for her by the gate, she wouldn’t be more than a moment; now Ignacio Abel thought he remembered hearing the sound of the waiting car’s engine, sure he’d heard the startling noise of a door opening and closing; when he went out to the vestibule, hadn’t he detected a faint trace of Judith’s scent? He examined the immediate past because he was obsessed with confirming he’d had her within reach, as if that might somehow alleviate the reality of her disappearance. Without a hat, briefcase in hand, I see him from the other side of the street as he walks quickly down Calle de Alcalá, paying no attention to the window of the travel agency that displays the scale model of an ocean liner his children always look at, as if he had an urgent appointment, reviewing the possible routes Judith might have taken just a few minutes earlier because by now he’s convinced she’d been very close by, and if he hurries and acts intelligently, he can find her. She had reached and was inside the Atocha or North Station or perhaps had returned to the pensión on the Plaza de Santa Ana and was closing her suitcases, the taxi, its motor running, at the entrance, the balconies lit around the plaza, the taverns full. Any possibility he chose would eliminate the others. If he had his car, if a taxi came along, if traffic weren’t so tied up, if so many people weren’t crowding the sidewalks, getting in his way, overflowing into the street. Without taxis or streetcars the distances in Madrid expanded. In twenty or twenty-five minutes he could reach the Atocha Station. In anticipation he saw the iron vault, the glass illuminating the plaza like a great globe of light. Tied to the ground as in dreams by the slowness of his steps, he saw himself running through the waiting room to a Judith dressed for travel and about to get on the train. But most likely he’d make the wrong decision and race between stations, exhausting himself and missing Judith’s departure. On the terrace of the Café Lion they’d brought out loudspeakers, and people gathered around them and climbed up on the iron chairs and tables to listen to proclamations repeated by a metallic-sounding voice, the optimism of official communiqués. The government can count on sufficient resources to crush the criminal attack that enemies of the regime and the working class have undertaken. He looked inside the café, imagining that Negrín would be there, but a sense of urgency he couldn’t control kept pushing him forward. A feverish public drank steins of beer and smoked and ate plates of seafood while sweating waiters plowed their way through, trays raised above their heads. Forces loyal to the Republic are fighting boldly to quash the insurrectionists once and for all. The announcer’s voice vibrated with the emphatic timbre of a sports rebroadcast. A column of heroic Asturian miners is approaching Madrid to offer their assistance to the people of the capital. So it was true they were going to revolt, he thought coldly, almost with relief, with an indifference born of unreality and distance to the voices he was hearing, the mob of bodies he had to pass to continue moving forward. After the official communiqué the “Himno de Riego” was played, followed by a piercing female voice singing “Échale guindas al pavo.” Repeated reports of the defeat of the uprising or of fanciful military exploits were shouted, mixing with the patrons’ hoarse voices ordering more rounds of beer and plates of grilled shrimp or fried squid. The felon Queipo de Llano is fleeing in fear from the enraged people of Sevilla, and soldiers deserting the rebel ranks are cheering the Republic. Again the sinister Spanish farce, he thought, the barracks interjection and bugle call, military parades to the rhythm of a paso doble, the eternal filth of the national fiesta. Trucks filled with armed peasants circled the crowd in a slow eddy around the fountain at Cibeles, then moved like a tide up the other section of Alcalá toward the Puerta del Sol. Through the trees in the garden the large windows of the Ministry of War were lit up as on the night of an official dance. At the entrance gates a small tank with a laughable cannon kept guard. The soldiers on duty came to attention every time an official car went in or came out. Rockets or gunfire exploded and the crowd swayed like a wheat field in the wind. Above the buildings on the Gran Vía, Ignacio Abel could see the dome of a church enveloped in flames. Red cinders fell on roofs with the splendor of fireworks. He turned toward the Paseo del Prado at the corner of Correos, where a parked truck was filled with Assault Guards, impassive under their service-cap visors that gleamed like patent leather in the low light. At the edge of the sidewalk a car brushed by him like a strong gust, and from it came warning shouts and the guffaws of young men who pointed rifles and pistols out the windows, a red-and-black flag flapping in the air like a boat’s slack sail. Each car, each truck bristling with flags and upraised fists and rifles. Each human group seemed to advance in one direction, but each group’s direction was different from all the others, and the general effect was of several parades coming together at a traffic barrier, a band competition. From the great whirlpool of Cibeles rose a discord of motors and horns, bursts of anthems, catcalls, rage. There was light in all the balconies of the Bank of Spain. Something was about to happen and nobody knew what, something must have occurred already and was irreparable, something desired and something feared. Judith Biely had disappeared forever or could appear in the crowd around any corner; enthusiasm and panic vibrated like simultaneous waves in the nocturnal heat, a fever rising, a carnival, a catastrophe.

But the Paseo del Prado was dark and silent; coming upon it, with its enormous somber trees and classical façades of large columns and granite cornices, was like arriving in another city and another time, a city indifferent to the upheavals of a distant, plebeian future. Ignacio Abel went down the central walk, always alert, looking for a streetcar or taxi. Judith might be in the Atocha Station, in which case he’d have lost any chance of finding her. She also could have left by car. He paused for a moment: perhaps Judith had sought refuge in Philip Van Doren’s house; wouldn’t it be better to retrace his steps and set out for the Gran Vía? Or look for her at the pensión on the Plaza de Santa Ana? The map of Madrid expanded into a labyrinth of possible routes, points of departure. Cars filled with suitcases, their curtains drawn, were leaving on the La Coruña highway and on the road to Burgos, carrying those traveling to their long seigniorial summers in the north, fleeing the city and the nation, many of them knowing with absolute certainty what everyone else was whispering and fearing: something was going to happen, the storm that will make the air crackle with explosions, and no one will know how to predict the moment the deluge will come and sink everything. But no one can imagine what will come or predict the scale of the disaster, not even those who helped unleash it. Now Ignacio Abel was walking toward Atocha, carried along by the inertia of his baseless decision — the express about to leave, the whistle and steam of the locomotive, Judith Biely beautiful and tall on the step in her hat and dress, jumping to the platform as the train starts to move and falling into his arms. His perturbed mind became agitated in a discord of impulses and imaginings: Judith fleeing him and Madrid on this night of brilliant fires and agitated crowds, Adela and his children isolated in the summer house, searching for news in a village where the electricity went off at eleven, radio signals didn’t come in clearly, and the only telephone was in the station; and he clutched Judith’s farewell letter in his trouser pocket, hurrying among the cars driving at top speed through the Plaza de Neptuno, blowing their horns to the rhythm of the shouts of excited people jammed into the Carrera de San Jerónimo in front of the Congress of Deputies, where all the windows were open and lit though the great door remained locked. He didn’t understand what they were shouting, the word every throat repeated. What could be the physical principle that ruled the movements of the crowd, regulated its powerful currents, the overflowing energy of the flood? A group of boys splashed in the water of the Neptune fountain as they climbed the statue to hang a red flag from the trident. Reality broke into implausible images that suddenly became commonplace. Where had the weapons come from that everyone seemed to be brandishing now with an air more festive than war-like, or the luxury automobiles with labor union slogans painted on the sides, driven not by solemn chauffeurs in service caps and uniforms but by young men in unbuttoned shirts or proletarian coveralls, chewing on cigarettes and shouting as they stepped on the accelerator like horsemen launching into a gallop? But walking down the Paseo del Prado was enough to enter darkness and silence again; the faint light of the street lamps revealed the large mass and columns of the museum. He’d walked in this same spot with Judith, among the myrtle hedges and flowerbeds on the lawn, under the gigantic cedars; he’d introduced her to the Botanical Garden, sunk into a darkness fragrant with fertile soil and vegetation behind the high locked gates. Among the gardens on the paseo he saw shadows moving, lit ends of cigarettes. Bargain-priced prostitutes and poor clients looked for corners favorable to the night’s lechery. The wide ogival vault of the station emerged at the end of a dusty esplanade where the unoccupied carousel of a deserted festival turned. Lanterns and little tricolor paper flags, huts with barbaric drawings in strong colors, shooting galleries with girls who looked sadly into the emptiness or applied lipstick to pursed lips, loudspeakers over which bullfight paso dobles and hurdy-gurdy tunes played for no one. A poster announced the wonder of Siamese twins joined at the head and a turtle woman who had hands and feet but no arms or legs. Under the awning of a stand selling drinks, scowling men smoked as they grouped around a radio that broadcast military marches and dance music. The iron-and-glass façade of the station shone like a beacon on the border of the night, and beyond it extended the empty lots and last suburbs of Madrid, the faint lines of lights on the nearby rural horizon. With all their windows lit, the buildings were sheets of black cardboard outlined against the intense navy blue of a night in July.

A streetcar on fire came down Calle de Atocha, trailing a wake of black smoke above the curls of flames and flashes of blue sparks in the electric cables. Another bonfire rose above some houses, a column of smoke lit from inside by the flames devouring the roof of a church. If Judith was taking the train, he couldn’t stop her now: at the top of the station a clock showed ten minutes after ten. But perhaps no trains would leave tonight, or would leave late, trapped by the upheaval in the city. Shouldn’t he take a train too, go back to the village where Adela and his children were waiting, isolated from everything, in the house where the electricity would be turned off soon and candles and kerosene lamps lighted? Too many desires, too many loyalties and urgencies, the disassociated thought of his actions, his consciousness breaking apart like shards of a broken mirror crumbling as he crossed the waiting rooms and walked up and down platforms in the station that didn’t seem affected by the disturbance and disorder in the streets, where the night express trains were moving as indifferently as the carousel’s horses and carriages would go around at the next festival. Well-dressed people looked out the windows of the blue sleeping cars, uniformed employees pushed carts with opulent suitcases, trunks with metal-reinforced corners and stickers from international hotels. The best families in Madrid took the night express to Lisbon. He searched among the people: one by one he looked at the faces at the windows, the ones he saw walking along the illuminated passageways, those he saw through the window of the bar; from a distance he made out a figure with her back turned who for a moment was Judith, and then was a stranger who looked nothing like her. “She hasn’t left yet,” he told himself. “She hasn’t had time, she lost her courage, she hasn’t found a train ticket, if I go home now I’ll find a message from her, the phone will ring and it will be her, daring to call me because she knows I’m alone.” Three men in civilian clothes and armed with rifles came toward him. The metal of a bolt grated and the cold mouth of a barrel pressed against his chest. One of the men wore a military cap pulled down over his forehead. The one whose rifle jabbed at him had a cigarette in his mouth and blinked to keep the smoke out of his eyes. The third had a pistol in the belt worn over a threadbare jacket.

“Come on, papers.”

At first Ignacio Abel didn’t understand: who were these armed men without uniforms, why did they demand his documents so peremptorily? As it happened, he had his national identity card and his UGT card in his wallet.

“A gent with a union card.” They looked at the identification in the light of a lamp: the man holding the rifle kept prodding him with it. Up close, the weapon was an enormous thing, crude, heavy, a log with hardware. It might go off in the hands of this nervous young man, who obviously didn’t handle it with much skill, and the bullet would shatter his chest. He might die right now, without warning, on this summer night, a step away from the well-dressed travelers who looked at their watches, impatient for the train to leave for Lisbon, in an act completely disconnected from the sequence of his life, on a platform in the Atocha Station. He heard shouts and shots nearby; bullets resounded against the metal rafters and a shower of pulverized glass fell from the vault. Called by someone, the three men lost all interest in Ignacio Abel and ran out with the dramatic gestures of film characters, crouching, looking from one side to the other, their weapons in their hands.

He walked out of the station. The taxi stand was deserted. His legs trembled and his heartbeat accelerated. Perhaps right now the phone was ringing in his dark empty apartment and it was Judith calling him — knowing that only he would answer — perhaps regretful, perhaps frightened and seeking refuge. Too many times I lacked the strength to do what I should have done and leave you. He’d open the door as quickly as he could because he’d heard the phone from the landing, and when he finally picked up the receiver, breathless, the voice he’d hear would be Adela’s, calling from the bar at the station in the Sierra, distressed at not having heard from him. The burning streetcar had overturned at the end of Calle de Atocha and continued to burn close to the carousel and stalls of the festival, surrounded by a group of children who threw things onto the flames, jumping just as they did around the bonfires on the night of San Juan. On a shack a canvas sign lit by a border of lightbulbs announced in large red letters the spectacle of the Spider Woman and the Alligator Man. Now he saw Judith phoning, persisting, the bell ringing for no one in the shadowy hall of his apartment. He saw what wasn’t before him, the faces lit by flames from the streetcar on the sidewalk of Atocha Square, and behind the glass doors of bars, and in the gloomy depths of drunkards’ taverns, and on the sidewalks where neighbors argued loudly, raising their voices above the discordant sounds of horns and radios — their faces blurred, spectral. He saw as in a revelation, as a certainty, that Judith was phoning not from her pensión on the Plaza de Santa Ana or a booth at the back of a café but from Van Doren’s house, beside the large windows that overlooked the horizon of roofs and fires in Madrid. She must be there, no doubt about it. He saw everything: Van Doren preparing for the journey she’d decided to join, the luxury trunks ready in the middle of the living room, the servants taking care of final details, and Judith deciding to call to ask him to come with them, out of love and the fear that something might happen to him. It will hurt as much as if a part of me had been torn out—and then in English—but this is the only decent sensible thing for me to do. The handwriting was almost illegible, it had been written so quickly, perhaps not because she was in a hurry to take a trip but because she wanted to finish a painful task as fast as she could. Roaring motorcycles of the Assault Guards went up Calle de Atocha in formation, making way for a fire truck, its bell sounding frantically and all its lights on. The more Ignacio Abel walked, the more suffocating the dense smoke and the smell of gasoline and burning wood became. Groups of children ran around as excited as on a festival night when they’ve been allowed to stay out late. Going up Atocha, he’d cross the heart of Madrid on a diagonal to reach the Gran Vía and the tower of the Palace of the Press, where he’d seen Judith for the second time and fallen in love with her. But he found himself trapped, pushed against a wall on the sidewalk when the fire truck tried to turn onto a narrower street and couldn’t get through, because there were too many people or because they stood in front of the truck to block its way. On a balcony a man in an undershirt and pajama bottoms smoked a cigarette and fanned himself with a newspaper as he leaned on the railing. Women’s screams mixed with the revving of the fire truck’s engine and the useless ringing of its bell. A young man carrying a wooden shotgun or a broomstick climbed onto the running board and began breaking windows, shattered glass falling to the street. The truck moved forward with a jerk and the young man fell to the ground on his back. The sound of the engine and the bell drowned out voices: Ignacio Abel saw open mouths moving in the nearby glare of the burning church. If he didn’t move away soon he’d be crushed by the torrent of people between the wall and the fire truck. He swallowed saliva that tasted of gasoline and ash and felt the glow of flames on his skin. But he could move only in the direction of the fire. If I died tonight, if I never saw you again. He moved ahead of the truck that was still blocked and the Assault Guards who’d dismounted their motorcycles and were waving their arms, blowing whistles or shouting orders no one paid attention to. Lightheaded from the smoke, he didn’t realize at first where he was. In a sudden break he went back in time to a vision from his childhood: in the church enveloped in flames he’d made his First Communion; in its gloomy nave, under candlelight, his father’s coffin had rested. Adjacent to the church was the secondary school he’d attended, with its corridors he’d walked so many times on his way to the classrooms or the church or the playgrounds, the favored student, the widow’s son. From attic windows, on balconies looking over the plaza, the fire’s brilliance turned transfixed faces red and gave them an enchanted air. The flames climbed up the church’s dome. Torrents of melted lead ran like lava onto the roofs. A woman in a housedress lay on a corner of the plaza, covering her face with bloody hands. From the fire truck came a stream of water that turned into steam on the church’s façade. “They fired from the bell tower,” someone said near the injured woman, who was leaning now against the wall, wiping blood on her apron. “They should all be killed.” From a balcony several armed men fired at the church tower. The flames shot out of the highest windows of the school after an explosion of glass. The dusty baroque altarpieces would be burning, and the painted plaster statues of saints, the confessionals with their sinister latticework where Ignacio Abel had kneeled so often, so long ago; the library would burn, the benches in the classrooms, the long tables in the laboratory, the oilcloth map of the world; the glass beakers and test tubes would shatter. (Once when he’d been in the plaza with Judith on a sunny winter morning, he’d pointed out the classroom windows, the ones from which he used to look out; they stood in silence for a moment and heard the sounds of children at recess, as distant as if they echoed from the far end of time.) The houses in the neighborhood were so close together that if a single spark leaped too far or a little wind came up, it would set fire to the frames of old beams and wattles. But people clustered around the fire truck to keep it from approaching the church, and with sticks and stones broke the windows of the cab and climbed onto the back to cut the hoses with knives. On the roof of the cab a little boy pretended to march with a broom on his shoulder, wearing a fireman’s helmet in which his head disappeared. Beside their overturned motorcycles the Assault Guards, much taller and huskier than those harassing them, vainly shook the nightsticks and pistols that people leaped to grab.

But in memory, places and times are confused, that night’s faces, discontinuous images in the surreal city where he keeps looking for Judith as in a dream. Blazing fires and empty streets, tunnels of darkness, sirens and gunfire one after the other, the bells of emergency vehicles, radio loudspeakers hanging in the doorways of cafés broadcasting urgent, triumphant government communiqués or tirelessly repeating “Échale guindas al pavo” and the simple tunes of the flamenco-style band in “Mi jaca.” My pony gallops and cuts the wind when it passes through the port on the way to Jerez. All labor union members must report immediately to the headquarters of their organizations. He’d gallop if he could. He quickened his pace but didn’t want to walk too fast for fear of arousing suspicion, a man so well dressed didn’t belong in this neighborhood. He managed to leave the plaza where the church was burning, covering his nose and mouth with a handkerchief, and found himself, faint and lost, in alleyways he couldn’t recognize. He has searched for Judith Biely in dreams resembling this night, passing through urban labyrinths at once familiar and impenetrable. On a deserted street a blind man came toward him guided by a dog, tapping the wall with a stick that turned out to be a violin bow. There was a sputtering of gunfire and the dog arched its back and howled in fear, tightening the cord that held him around the neck like a noose. From the Plaza de Jacinto Benavente he could see above the roofs the illuminated clock at the top of the Telephone Company tower. A squad of Civil Guards on horseback rode down Calle Carretas at a trot, hooves rumbling on the paving stones in an unexpected parenthesis of solitude and silence, and beyond that rose an uproar that undoubtedly came from the Puerta del Sol. The display window of a shop that sold religious books and objects was smashed. Books, illustrations of saints, and plaster figures were being gathered up by a man and woman with an air of mourning who turned in fright when they heard him approach. The sidewalks along Calle Carretas were crowded with people heading for the Puerta del Sol, looking as if they’d just arrived in Madrid from much poorer and hotter regions, inhabitants of the outermost suburbs, huts and caves next to garbage dumps and rivers of fetid water, pits of poverty, advancing in great tribal clans toward the center of a city to which they’d never been admitted, dirty berets, scabby heads, toothless mouths, feet bare or wrapped in rags, a crude humanity that preceded politics. The metal shutters on bullfighter and flamenco taverns were battened down as they passed. Young men hanging in clusters from the trucks that passed with a squeal of brakes as they swerved back and forth on the curves greeted the destitute crowd by waving flags and raising fists, but these people looked in astonishment and didn’t respond, alien to any indoctrination, observing with distrust the puerile habits of the civilized. They’d climbed out of their ravines of caves and hovels as if responding to a collective, archaic impulse awakened by the fire. They came with their nomads’ provisions and rags, their packs of dogs, women with children on their backs or hanging from their breasts. Never until tonight had they dared to invade in large groups the streets forbidden to them. At the corner of Calle Cádiz a sudden stampede dragged Ignacio Abel along with it. Disheveled women and a swarm of children stormed an open grocery store. A tall case filled with glass jars and tin cans of food fell against the counter. The women put handfuls of lentils and garbanzos in their pockets, ran out with armfuls of loaves of bread and strings of sausages. Someone knocked the scale to the floor with the swipe of a hand. A knife slit open a sack of flour and the children scattered it in the air, rolling in it, their eyes big in their whitened faces. A hand entered Ignacio Abel’s trouser pocket; others tugged at his briefcase. At the bottom of the stairs the store’s owner appeared, shouting curses, waving his fists in the air. The barrel of a shotgun was pressed against his chest. The store opened onto a narrow alley that smelled of urine and fried food. There, Ignacio Abel was brushing the flour from his clothes when a voice spoke to him.

“Brother-in-law, good to see you.”

Adela’s brother took him by the arm and led him, almost by touch, up a dimly lit narrow staircase. At the top, off a corridor, was a room from which came a greenish light and the dry click of billiard balls. Someone appeared in the doorway when he heard approaching footsteps, a man much younger than Víctor who held a pistol, shiny with oil, in one hand and in the other a rag he’d been cleaning it with.

“Ignacio, what are you doing out on the street, and on this night?”

“Your parents and sister expected you today for lunch.”

“What a way to talk to me. As if I were a kid.”

“Who’s this, comrade?”

“My brother-in-law. No danger. Come in and have a drink with us, Ignacio. This isn’t a night to be wandering around.”

“I’m in a hurry. You ought to go to the Sierra, be with the family. Enough now of fantasies and pistols. This afternoon your father asked me to look out for you.”

They spoke quietly, close together in the corridor, near the half-open door through which came, along with the clicks of billiard balls, the sound of a radio program. The station wasn’t in Madrid but Sevilla. In the crackle of static a bugle sounded and then a barracks voice. Ignacio Abel was going to say something but Víctor indicated silence with his index finger. Ignacio couldn’t make out the words.

“That’s a soldier with both balls, brother-in-law. This’ll be over in two days. The best are with us. Look at the rabble that came out to defend your republic. To defend your republic by burning churches and breaking into stores.”

“If they catch you listening to that station, you’ll be in big trouble. You and your friends.”

“How you talk to me, brother-in-law, I can’t believe it, as if I were a kid.”

“They’ll kill you if they find that pistol on you.”

“What pistol?”

“The one you’re carrying in your jacket pocket. Are you carrying your Falange card too?”

“So many questions and you don’t say anything.”

“Go back to the Sierra tonight. Stay there with the family until this business calms down.”

“This isn’t going to calm down, brother-in-law. No going back now. Haven’t you heard Queipo on the radio? In two days there’ll be two columns of legionnaires cleaning up Madrid, the way they cleaned up Asturias in ’34. There won’t be enough street lamps to string up all the bastards. Blood will flow like water in the Manzanares. Remember what I’m telling you. Spain can be cleansed only with a torrent of blood.”

“Is that phrase yours?”

“If it weren’t for the situation, I’d shoot you right now.”

“Don’t deny yourself.”

The same young man appeared in the corridor, still holding the pistol and rag. He wore military boots under his civilian trousers.

“Anything going on, comrade?”

“Nothing, comrade. We’re just talking.”

“Well, make it quick, there’s a lot to do.”

“Do you think because you’re my sister’s husband and the father of my niece and nephew that I’ll always put up with your ridiculing me?”

“Get out of my way. I have to go.”

“Go where? To cheat on my sister?”

“If you need anything, come to the apartment. You’ll be safe there.”

“You mean if I’m afraid, I can hide at your place?”

“If it were only mine, but no, it’s also Adela’s.”

“Look, you’re the one who ought to ask me for a place to hide.”

“Not very likely. Your side surrendered in Barcelona.”

“Do you still believe what the government says?”

“It’s the legitimate government. It’ll always be more trustworthy than a lying military gang.”

“A legitimate government doesn’t distribute weapons to criminals or open the jails to let out all the murderers. Look what your friends from the Popular Front are doing. Killing people like dogs in the street. Burning churches. Taking advantage of the confusion to commit armed robbery.”

“I have to go, Víctor.”

“If I were you, I wouldn’t be out on the street tonight. Don’t think you’re safe because you’re a Socialist. They’re destroying Socialists like you. Even your own people are calling you traitors.”

“Traitors are the ones who swear loyalty to the Republic and then rise up against it.”

“Go home and stay there. This little party by your revolutionary friends will end right now. The Civil Guard is with us. The best of the army. Before midnight every garrison in Madrid will be on the streets.”

“Aren’t you running off at the mouth?”

Víctor, his thin hair flat against his skull, blocked his way in the corridor. He was breathing with a disturbing sound in his weak lungs. The pistol bulged on one side of his chest, under his summer jacket. He made a gesture of moving his hand toward it, perhaps to refute the sarcasm of his sister’s husband with visible proof of his manhood. Ignacio Abel brushed him aside and looked for an exit in the dark. At his back he heard the snap of a pistol’s hammer and resisted the temptation to turn around. He felt his way down the stairs, and when he reached the doorway he stepped on spilled garbanzos or lentils or grains of rice, the glass of broken bottles, of jars that gave off a strong smell of vinegar. The metal shutters of the grocery store were down and the looters had disappeared. He went to the street and walked to the Puerta del Sol. He should have retraced his steps or taken a side street, but by now it was impossible. He wasn’t walking, he was pushed, dragged in the direction of the great uproar that rose from the square, not of human voices but the prolonged boom of a storm, an avalanche plunging down a slope, leveling everything, joined by car horns, the sirens of ambulances or fire trucks or Assault Guard vans. His sense of time was completely off. Running into Adela’s brother, their absurd conversation in the dark. He counted the strokes of the clock at the nearby Ministry of the Interior: it was only eleven. In ten minutes at most he could cross the Puerta del Sol, go up Calle del Carmen or Calle de Preciados to Callao, reach Van Doren’s house — he wouldn’t wait for the elevator, he’d run up the stairs and go straight across the hall, where he’d heard the music that once led him to Judith. With the determination of a sleepwalker he gave himself until midnight to find her. If he persisted, he might still get her back. If he could manage to make his way through the multitude of bodies, heads, faces contorted by screaming mouths, fists shaking in the air, keeping time with syllables repeated like percussive blows against the concave line of buildings in the square, violent sound waves breaking against the cubic mass of the Ministry of the Interior, where the balconies were wide open, revealing interiors with large crystal chandeliers and salons upholstered in red. Wea-pons, wea-pons, wea-pons, wea-pons, wea-pons, wea-pons. The headlights of cars and trucks surrounded by the crowd illuminated their faces dramatically; drivers blew their horns, unable to get through the mob. Wea-pons, wea-pons, wea-pons, wea-pons, wea-pons. People were climbing up on the roofs of halted streetcars and the plinths of street lamps, to the barred windows of the ground floor of the ministry, as if trying to escape a rising flood. Above the roofs neon signs blinked for Anís del Mono and Tío Pepe—The Sun of Andalucía in a Bottle—the bottle of fino sherry topped by a broad-brimmed hat and dressed in the short jacket of a picador or a flamenco dancer. A single shout rose as one, the rhythm marked by feet stamping on the ground and fists shaken in unison, some holding pistols, rifles, sticks, shotguns, swords. Wea-pons, they shouted, separating the syllables, exaggerating them in a hoarse pulsation that made the air vibrate like the passage of trains beneath the pavement. The word sounded like a demand and also an invocation. Wea-pons, wea-pons, wea-pons, wea-pons, like a furious stampede, one syllable after the other, drowning out with their volume speeches that indistinct figures shouted into microphones from the balconies of the ministry. In his light suit and with his briefcase firmly held to his chest, I lose sight of Ignacio Abel in the sea of heads and raised fists that fills the Puerta del Sol, submerged at times in shadow, then illuminated by the blue light of street lamps or the headlights of cars trying to move forward. Like the voices, faces become confused. He pushes from the side, manages to move forward a few steps, and the flow of a human current makes him retreat again, as if losing strength as he swims toward a shore that seems constantly to recede, the corner of Calle del Carmen, though now there’s a whirlpool that drags him toward it, while a storm of applause shakes the entire plaza, perhaps because on the balcony of the ministry another figure has appeared and cries out and gesticulates just like the previous one. The applause is transformed into a vibration of clapping, and above that another shout ascends, not two syllables but three, UHP, rumbling in the concavity of one’s stomach like the bumping of a train’s wheels beneath a great iron vault: Yew, Aitch, Pee. But perhaps what they are cheering isn’t the figure gesturing wildly on the balcony but some Assault Guards who’ve been raised onto shoulders and sit erect above the heads with unstable gestures of triumph, like bullfighters who a little while earlier had been knocked down in the ring, caps to one side, tunics open over sweat-stained undershirts, shouting things no one can hear, and a moment later they’ve been taken down or have fallen in a sudden undulation of the shoulders that supported them. Just then the whirlpool carrying Ignacio Abel opens an empty space in its center, where a wardrobe or dresser thrown down from a balcony has broken into fragments, so close to the corner that if he boldly pushes a little more he’ll be able to touch it. The crash of the furniture against the paving stones widens the circular space, where things continue falling, each collision received with shouts of rejoicing and a round of applause. From a balcony on the second floor, men wearing blue coveralls and peaked military caps, cartridge belts and rifles strapped diagonally across their backs, throw into the square a large desk that several of them have lifted over the railing, and from it comes a gale of papers that for a time fly over the heads of the crowd; they toss down chairs, coat racks, an overly large sofa that at first is stuck on the balcony and finally is pushed over, to shouts of encouragement; a militiaman appears holding a huge portrait of Alejandro Lerroux, and the people in the square receive it with shouts of Fascist! and Traitor! and when it falls to the ground they fight to trample on it. Ignacio Abel has reached the corner by now and breathes a sigh of relief when he’s blinded by the headlights of a truck that has braked in front of him. With a roar the truck goes into reverse and turns, and people surround it, blocking Ignacio Abel’s way again. In the truck bed a canvas tarp is raised and a group of men in civilian clothes, wearing military caps and helmets, begin to pry open long boxes. Now Ignacio Abel is pushed against the truck, and when he tries to move away, eager faces and extended hands prevent him. Weapons, they say, not shouting now. The word multiplies, extends, and each time someone says it, the group becomes denser and the shoving stronger. He’ll have to move away if he doesn’t want to be flattened against the back of the truck. He hears the creak of the boards as nails are pulled out, someone’s voice shouting with an accent of command, We don’t give anything to anybody without a union card. The man who seemed to be speaking with the certainty of being obeyed now stumbles and almost falls, holding a helmet too big for him down on his head. The people climb onto the truck, pull the lids off the boxes, take out rifles, pistols, and grenades, and the truck seems to move, to shift a little under the pressure of the bodies leaning against it, the hands and shoulders pushing, trying to get through, trying to reach the boxes, which are overturned now, spilling weapons with a crash of metal, pistols and rifle bolts and trampled boards, small boxes of bullets that roll to the ground and are grabbed by the handful. Ignacio Abel has stepped on something that crunches under his shoe but doesn’t turn to see what it is, perhaps someone’s hand, but he’s managed to get free. He leaves the truck behind and finds himself looking at a suddenly empty Calle del Carmen.

He’ll never get there. At the Carmen Church, beside its open doors, armed militiamen are putting up a barricade or roadblock of long benches and kneeling stools. Several are attempting to pull a confessional down the steps, shouting encouragement to one another. It may not be a barricade; they may simply be piling up benches and the gilded panels of altarpieces to light a bonfire. “Where are you going so fast? Papers, comrade.” It seems that rigorous rules have been established overnight, which didn’t exist yesterday and today are obeyed by everyone without question. Again the card hurriedly looked for in his pockets, his controlled impatience, his fear of rifle barrels held by inexpert hands, of sideways glances. If they let him go, in less than five minutes he could be ringing the bell at Van Doren’s house. The one who’s looking at the union card in the light of a street lamp doesn’t know how to read and isn’t used to handling papers. Perhaps he recognizes the seal, the initials in red ink, UGT. A small woman dressed in a blue coverall, from which a cartridge belt is hanging, asks him to open his briefcase: documents, plans. “I’m an architect,” says Ignacio Abel, looking into her eyes, not too long, afraid of provoking her. “I work at University City.” How little is needed for dignity to be wiped out, for you to move your head and smile and melt inside with gratitude toward someone who could arrest or execute you but instead returns your identification, gestures with a hand, and lets you pass. In the Plaza de Callao there are trucks with their motors running, their sides armored with metal sheets held on somehow, and mattresses tied to the roofs with rope. At the Cine Callao the blinking sign announces the premiere of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 6:45 and 10:45, numbered seats. A triumph! At the door of the Hotel Florida a couple, foreign tourists, watch with placid curiosity the goings and comings of the militiamen, the parade of automobiles driving at top speed toward the Plaza de España, sinking into the darkness of the last stretch of the Gran Vía, where spectral buildings are under construction and wide empty lots are enclosed by board fences covered by political posters. Waves of people holding flags and walking toward the Puerta del Sol singing anthems in fatigued voices meet, but don’t mix, with the slightly dazed people who are leaving the last show at the Cine de la Prensa. Air-cooled, 14 weeks!! Morena Clara, with Imperio Argentina and Miguel Ligero. On the sidewalk in front of Van Doren’s building, two cars form a corridor to the curb where a truck is waiting, its back doors open. On the hood of each of the cars is an American flag. The automobiles and small flags delimit a parenthesis of stillness no one interrupts. Between the truck and the building entrance, Philip Van Doren’s maids in caps and butlers in uniform come and go, carrying bundles, boxes, and trunks, holding crates of paintings in gloved hands, not hurrying, as if they were preparing their employer for a journey to the door of a country house. Inside the entrance, on each side of the elevator, stand two martial-looking young American men dressed in civilian clothes, their arms crossed, legs slightly apart. They inspect Ignacio Abel from head to toe and indicate with a gesture that he may take the elevator; another young American, his hair short, operates it. The elevator operators’ strike has no effect here either. He once rode up in this same elevator not knowing he was going to meet her, walked along this hall listening to the clarinet and piano music from a distance. Butlers and maids come and go in methodical silence, carrying carefully packed objects, paintings, sculptures, lamps, all of the servants so sure of their assignments you barely hear anyone giving orders. An American flag is fastened above the door of the apartment. Ignacio Abel goes in without anyone stopping him or seeming to notice him. The almost empty space is larger and whiter than he remembered. Before that window Judith had stood, a shiny record in her hands. The gramophone has been packed, and a maid, kneeling on the rug, has just placed a pile of records into a made-to-measure box. A man in a mechanic’s coverall is taking apart a complicated floor lamp with chrome tubing and a spherical globe of white glass. The windows are open but the street noises filter in like distant waves. Judith can appear right now in any doorway. Ignacio Abel sees himself in one of the tall mirrors and doesn’t recognize himself: the sweaty face, the loosened tie, the briefcase pressed against his chest. At the end of the room, next to a window through which the Capitol Building’s tower — as slender as a prow, crossed by the bright Paramount Pictures sign — seems close, Philip Van Doren is looking through binoculars and speaking on the phone in English, dressed in a short-sleeve shirt, light trousers, and white sport shoes, his shaved head gleaming under the ceiling lights. He’s seen Ignacio Abel reflected in the glass and turns toward him, smiling, when he hangs up the phone. He smells of soap and fresh cologne, a recent shower. He doesn’t know where Judith is, or if he does know, he won’t say, because he’s promised her not to tell him. On Ignacio Abel’s face — the unfamiliar face Abel saw a moment ago in the mirror — Van Doren sees signs of a disappointment that suddenly makes Abel’s fatigue worse. Van Doren’s Spanish has become even more precise and flexible in recent months.

“Professor Abel, you’ve arrived at an opportune time. Come with me. I’m leaving for France in half an hour. Unfortunately we’ll have to take the long way, on the Valencia highway, because by now we might not be able to get out going north — the rebels will come in that way. The question is whether the government can count on a sufficient number of loyal units to defend the Guadarrama passes. Did you come in this afternoon from the Sierra, as you do every Sunday? Were the trains still running?”

Without waiting for a reply, he turned toward the window, gesturing to Ignacio Abel to approach. Implicit in the question about the Sierra was an allusion to possible confidences from Judith, perhaps to the double adulterous life he’d no longer take part in as an accessory, knowing she’d ended it. The vanity of showing or suggesting he knew things about others without revealing the source of his knowledge provided Van Doren with an intense satisfaction. He looked through the binoculars, pointing toward the long, almost dark tunnel of the end of the Gran Vía, down which came flashes of headlights. In the background, beyond the vague, barely lit rectangle of the Plaza de España, the Mountain Garrison was a great block of shadows dotted with small windows. Van Doren handed the binoculars to Ignacio Abel. Far away, at a distance the tiny size of the figures made remote, armed men stood guard at the corners, behind the street lamps, watching at their posts with the immobility of lead soldiers.

“The other question is why the rebel military didn’t come out of the Mountain Garrison when there was still time to take the city. Now it’s too late. Have you seen the cannon at the corner, on the right? They’ll make sure no one comes out, and as soon as it’s light they’ll fire. It’ll be like shooting trout in a barrel. But I’m sure our Judith would have found a better expression in Spanish.”

Her name spoken aloud made Ignacio Abel’s heart pound. He’d gone to Van Doren’s house looking for Judith and now he didn’t have the courage to ask about her.

“You speak as if you’re sorry the uprising has failed.”

“And what makes you think that? Do you believe those militiamen armed with old shotguns will defeat the army? As you can see, they’ve begun to devote themselves to the revolution. The strange thing is that they’re putting so much effort into burning the churches in Madrid, so unfortunate from an architectural point of view. The military will win, but they’re very dim and will wait too long, and in the meantime there’s nothing for people like you or me to do here. I at least can count on the protection of my embassy. But you, Professor Abel — what are you going to do? Is there still time for you to go back to the Sierra with your family? It’s better if you come with me until the danger’s past. You know you’re not safe in Madrid. It was enough to look at your face when you came in to realize you know it. From Biarritz we can make arrangements with the embassy and Burton College for your trip to America. You just have to tell us who’ll be traveling with you.”

The telephone rang in the empty room, where workers had just finished rolling up the calfskin and zebra rugs. Beyond the windows a horizon of fires shone above the roofs. A maid brought the phone to Van Doren, who moved away from Ignacio Abel, listening with his head lowered, responding with monosyllables in English. It must be Judith calling, and he’d hide it from him, warn her not to come, to wait for him somewhere. Van Doren hung up and looked at his wristwatch, making the automatic gesture of pushing up his sleeves as if to get to work.

“Things no one has seen are going to happen here, Professor. Now it’s the turn of those who control Madrid, but then the others will come, and I’m not referring to the old soldiers who haven’t dared to leave their garrisons and are waiting to be killed. I’m referring to the Army of Africa, Professor Abel. You and I, if we’re still alive when they come in, will not want to see what they do in Madrid. They’ll descend like the Italian legionnaires in Abyssinia. They’ll have even less pity, except they know how to kill. They know how, and they like it.”

“The Army of Africa can’t leave Morocco. The navy hasn’t joined the uprising. What ships will they use to cross the strait?”

Standing in the middle of the empty room, Philip Van Doren looked at Ignacio Abel as if pitying him for his incurable innocence, his inability to understand the things that mattered, which he discovered thanks to sources he wasn’t going to reveal. In all the empty space, the only thing left was the telephone on the floor. A servant closed the windows and took down the blinds, and when he finished, he approached Van Doren and said something in his ear, looking at Ignacio Abel out of the corner of his eye.

“For the last time, Professor, come with me. Why stay here? You have no one left in Madrid.”