In the Night of Time

29

HE WAS DEAD, and for several days early in September Ignacio Abel searched for him in vain, wandering from one end of Madrid to the other, looking suspicious in his light suit and tie and neatly folded handkerchief in the breast pocket of his jacket among the men with unshaven faces in unbuttoned shirts and blue coveralls who filled the streets and café terraces, the young men who carried rifles over their shoulders and wore pistols and cartridge belts around their waists, demanding papers or ordering passersby to put up their hands. That morning he told Señorita Rossman to wait until he returned, and if he learned anything he’d telephone her; he showed her where the kitchen was in case she wanted something to eat, though there was little food left in the cupboard or refrigerator. Throughout the day he thought of her, imagining her in the same position in which he’d left her, sitting at the dining room table in front of the glass of water, waiting for his return or a telephone call, crushed by a grief that when transmitted to him changed into guilt, a bottomless remorse for not having helped her and Professor Rossman as much as he should have, helped them with true conviction and not out of pity, perhaps turning in a timely way to influential friends. Señorita Rossman’s desperate overconfidence in coming to him for help led him to an unrealistic sense of resolve. He leafed through his pocket diary for names, addresses, and telephone numbers; with her present he made calls that weren’t answered (the telephone lines weren’t working or phones rang in empty houses or abandoned offices). With a decisive air he put on his jacket and tie and placed his wallet and keys in his pocket but didn’t know where to go, whom to ask for help. Since the hot July night when he’d looked for Judith Biely in a Madrid that had become alien to him, he’d lived in a state of lethargy, a sort of convalescence, in the empty apartment, going every day to his office in University City, now deserted except for patrols of militiamen, or people who stole building materials, or groups, almost always women, who walked the empty lots at first light to search among the previous night’s dead. Toward the middle of August, large families who’d fled to Madrid before the advancing enemy army camped in some of the unfinished buildings: waves of refugees with wooden-wheeled carts and donkeys and mules, bent under the weight of possessions they’d attempted to save: mattresses, furniture, metal bed frames, cages of chickens. They lit their fires and cooked their pots of food in the half-completed lobbies, just as they did in public gardens in the heart of Madrid or under the arches of metro stations. Their goats and sheep grazed on the weeds of future sports fields where corpses would randomly appear, hands tied behind their backs. Packs of boys with shaved heads chased one another up and down the staircases and abandoned scaffolding until they bumped into a corpse, the boldest boys daring to go through the pockets or remove an article of clothing in good condition. As on so many mornings when he left for his office, with purposeless obstinacy that at least allowed him the deception of a certain degree of normality, Ignacio Abel told Señorita Rossman not to worry. The porter, now in a proletarian coverall and beret, greeted him as unctuously as when he wore blue livery and a visored cap. “Still no news about the señora and your children, Don Ignacio? I wouldn’t worry. As I say, things are calmer in the Sierra, even if they’re on the other side, and it’s healthier for the children. And a summer away from Madrid is sure to do the señora good.” The porter said this knowingly: he’d learned the reason Adela spent the last two weeks of June in a sanatorium — she didn’t have weak lungs. He smiled, leaning forward and perhaps calculating the possibility of denouncing him now, since he knew that Ignacio Abel, though he’d saved himself once, wasn’t invulnerable. “I see the señor has had a visitor,” said the porter. “The foreign señorita asked for you and I let her up because I remembered seeing her when she came to give your children lessons. The truth is she looked like someone who’s had some sorrow, but these days who doesn’t have troubles?” He proffered the insinuation along with a cautious hand: he’d close his hand around the offered coin just as he’d clutch at a confidence that might be of benefit to him and perhaps harmful to the one who’d formulated it, his old status as gossip elevated in the new era to that of expert informer.

He looked for Negrín in the Café Lion and was told he should look for him at the Workers’ Cooperative on Calle Piamonte, or at the War Ministry. His usual activity accelerated by the war, Negrín had always just left the place where Abel had almost found him. “Don Juan comes and goes all day,” said the man who shined shoes at the café and had an undying devotion to Negrín. “If he isn’t on his way up to the Sierra with his car full of bread and canned food for the boys in the militias, then he’s at a field hospital telling the nurses how to bandage wounds. You know how he is — that man never stops. And when he does have some free time, he comes here for me to shine his shoes and to drink down a mug of beer in one gulp. Too bad we don’t get the fresh prawns anymore that he likes so much. What a man. Things would’ve gone better for us if he’d been president when the insurgents rebelled. Though now you hear rumors that they’re going to name him to something big, a minister at least. What an honor. I tell him I’d like to be twenty years younger so I could go to the front and fight, and he tells me, ‘Agapito, if what you know how to do well is clean shoes, then clean shoes, it’s a noble trade. Things would be better for us Spaniards if instead of all of us talking so much, we worked harder at our trades.’ Would you like me to give him a message?” the shoeshine man asked Ignacio Abel. Hanging on the post office was an enormous half-torn poster of militiamen advancing, brandishing rifles with bayonets against a horizon of burned houses. The revolution was an apotheosis of typographies in strong colors, the war a catalogue of victories announced or predicted by newspapers in headlines that ended in exclamation points, and illustrated with pictures in photogravure of groups of ever-victorious volunteers raising rifles at the top of rugged crags or towers in towns just taken from the enemy. Ignacio Abel crossed the Castellana, which reeked of manure fermenting in the summer heat. Under the trees along the central paths, evacuees from the villages had hung their canvas tarps and made their fires, their donkeys tied to the trees. Where will they go when the cold weather begins and all of this isn’t over? How will it be possible to house and feed them if they keep arriving in increasing numbers, fleeing the enemy no one is stopping except in the fantasy of newspaper headlines and radio news reports? Where will the blankets come from, the winter uniforms, the boots to equip the militias who are now fighting bare-chested? He was stupefied to discover that without the links provided by his marriage to Adela and his affair with Judith Biely, he was almost totally lacking in social connections, a hermit who suddenly leaves his enclosure and knows nothing of the outside world. The relationships he’d established at work didn’t extend beyond the office, hadn’t evolved into friendships. Except for Judith, he didn’t recall ever having an intimate conversation with anyone. The cordiality he shared with Moreno Villa and Negrín was characterized by a strict reserve. A mixture of personal arrogance and keen class insecurity had always kept him at a distance from most of his fellow architects. Going around Madrid in search of Professor Rossman, stripped of the confidence his work, his family, even his lost lover had given him, he experienced his isolation as impotence, a lack of an anchor that had moved him away from things long before the city — the entire country — was set adrift by the upheaval of the military insurgency and a war. How solitary his life had been, an only child, then an orphan, entrusted to shadowy guardians, protected not so much by his intellectual abilities and determination to study as by the foresight of his father, who knew he was sick and saved money and took the steps necessary to continue protecting his son when he was no longer there, so he wouldn’t have to leave secondary school, so he could support himself at the university, watched over by his parents in the fulfillment of a destiny they had apportioned to him with their sacrifice. “My son, you’ll be so alone,” his mother said, touching his face with a hand deformed by work, in the provincial hospital bed where she lay dying. Her hand in his, grasping it, and one by one he had to loosen her fingers before letting it rest on the bed sheet. Only now did Ignacio Abel relive in memory the afternoon more than thirty years earlier when he’d walked from the East Cemetery to the dark porter’s lodging on Calle Toledo after burying his mother.

If he hurried, if he was lucky, perhaps he could still save Professor Rossman. He knocked on the doors of quasi-official agencies and elegant houses that had been seized and, he’d been told, were now secret prisons. In the courtyards, car engines roared and men in civilian clothes armed with rifles and large pistols tucked diagonally between the shirt and waistband of their trousers blocked his path and subjected him to interrogations that didn’t always end when he opened his wallet to show his credentials: his Socialist Party and General Union of Workers membership cards, the safe-conduct issued to him so he could continue visiting the suspended construction sites at University City. He said Professor Rossman’s name, explained his status as an eminent foreign anti-Fascist refugee in Spain, and showed the photograph his daughter had given him. He caught looks of possible recognition, gestures of complicity. He put the photo away after receiving a negative reply and continued searching: perhaps he ought to ask at the Academy of Fine Arts, at the State Security Office, at the police station on Calle Fomento. “This guy has the face of a dead man,” someone said to him, laughing. “You should look for him in the morgue, or on the San Isidro meadow. They have a picnic there every night.” He knocked on the doors of palaces decorated now by red or red-and-black flags, their façades covered with layer upon layer of propaganda posters. He made his way along narrow corridors filled with tobacco smoke, saw fatigued, garrulous, unshaven men talking on the phone, dictating lists of names to secretaries, all of them pulled along by a nervous urgency in which the presence of Ignacio Abel was an inconvenience: his insistence on making inquiries regarding someone no one knew anything about, repeating a name he had to spell over and over again, showing a photo that elicited an automatic negative response. In a salon with large balconies overlooking the Paseo de la Castellana, he approached with instinctive meekness a table with legs carved into lion’s claws, where a harried group of men, some wearing a suit and tie and with an official air and flanked by stenographers, judged or heard cases and examined papers. They passed around the photograph of Professor Rossman as if doubting its authenticity. One of them handed it back, shook his head, and gestured to an armed man in plain clothes sitting on a balcony. The guard seized Ignacio Abel’s arm and forced him out of the hall. “If I were you, I’d stop asking so many questions. Maybe this friend of yours turns out to be an insurgent and gets you in trouble.” As he walked down the staircase, he passed a group of militiamen pushing a man in handcuffs up the stairs, hitting him. For a moment their eyes met. In the man’s eyes was a plea for help; Ignacio Abel looked away.

He returned to the Workers’ Cooperative, and the sentry at the door told him Negrín had just left but had gone to a place nearby, the Socialist commissary on Calle Gravina. Negrín was loading cardboard boxes filled with foodstuffs and beverages into his car, wiping away sweat with a handkerchief, which he then stuffed into the breast pocket of his jacket.

“Help me, Abel, don’t just stand there,” he said with a peremptory gesture, not surprised to see him.

The two of them filled the trunk with canned food, sausages, sacks of potatoes. On the back seat were cases of beer and demijohns of wine wrapped in blankets.

“Don’t think badly of me, Ignacio. I’m not seizing all this food, and I won’t pay the comrades in the commissary with IOUs, like our heroic revolutionary patrols.”

The manager handed Negrín a long bill, and Negrín went over it with the point of a tiny pencil held between his large fingers. From a wallet held together by a rubber band he took out a handful of banknotes and paid the manager. He was already in the car and had started the motor when he told Ignacio Abel to get in and said goodbye to the commissary manager by holding his arm out the window with his fist clenched, in the same efficient way he’d extend it to signal a turn.

“Do you want me to drop you somewhere, Abel? I’m off to the Sierra to bring some food to the boys in the regiment my son Rómulo enlisted in. It’s a disgrace — there are no regular supplies of anything. They send those brave kids to the front and then don’t remember to bring them ammunition or food or blankets. If they don’t have enough trucks for food and ammunition, how come they’re still parading them through Madrid?” Boxed into a space that was too small, Negrín gestured over the wheel as he drove with abrupt accelerations and stops on the narrow streets, carried along by a mixture of indignation and enthusiasm. “So instead of despairing and wasting time by calling and asking the authorities to do something, I decided to take drastic action and do it myself. It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing, and besides, it keeps me busy. Come to think of it, how about helping me with your car?”

“It was requisitioned, Don Juan. I left it at the mechanic’s a few days before all this began and haven’t seen it since.”

“You’ve used precisely the right phrase: ‘all this.’ What are we living through? A war, a revolution, sheer absurdity, a variation on traditional Spanish summer fiestas? ‘All this.’ We don’t even know what name to give it. Did you hear what Juan Ramón Jiménez called it? When he was safe and sound in America, of course. A ‘mad tragic fiesta,’ that’s what Juan Ramón called it. The people’s great triumph. But he and Zenobia, just in case, rushed to put some distance between themselves and ‘all this.’ Do you know they were about to take him for a ride, as we say now? It’s a shame how things like this enter our vocabulary.”

“They were going to kill Juan Ramón Jiménez? What could they have suspected him of?”

“Suspected? Nothing. He had the same name as somebody else they were looking for, or he resembled him. His good teeth saved him.”

“So he bit his way out of it? He’s quick-tempered.”

“It’s no joke. The militiamen were sure of only one detail about the man they were looking for: he had false teeth. When Juan Ramón insisted they had the wrong man, they began to have their doubts. One of them figured they could just pull on his teeth and find out. Now you know that Juan Ramón has the best teeth in all of Madrid. A patrol almost arrested Don Antonio Machado because they thought he looked like a priest. But tell me, how long ago did they arrest your friend? It would be an international disgrace for us if anything happened to him. Yet another one.”

“I don’t know where to begin looking for him.”

“You don’t and neither does anybody else. It seemed we were going to abolish the bourgeois state, and now each party and union has its own jail and police force in addition to its own militias. What a great step forward. I suppose our enemies are delighted with us. In the Anarchist militias they vote on whether it’s a good idea to attack the enemy, in ours they shoot the few military commanders we have left for sabotage if an offensive fails. The miracle is that in the Sierra we’ve been able to contain the insurgents, and from the south they haven’t reached Madrid yet. And what about the Aragón front? If the brave columns of Catalán Anarchists keep breaking through and crushing the enemy’s defenses, how come they never reach Zaragoza? And if every day we’re about to take the Alcázar de Toledo, why haven’t we taken it yet? From what you tell me, I assume the people who picked up your friend were Communists. They wouldn’t have killed him right away, they would’ve wanted to interrogate him. Didn’t he live for a time in the Soviet Union? Go talk to Bergamín, at the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals. You know that one way or another he’s connected to everybody. Leave me a message at home if you find out anything. As soon as I get back from the Sierra tonight, I’ll look with you.”

“And where’s this Alliance?”

Negrín burst into laughter and made a sharp turn at the corner of the Plaza de Santa Bárbara to head west along the avenues.

“For God’s sake, Abel, you don’t know anything! The cream of the anti-Fascist intelligentsia has installed itself in the palace of the marquises of Heredia Spinola, one of the best in Madrid. They make war by editing a little newspaper with revolutionary poems, and to rest from their labors they give masquerade balls using the wardrobe of the marquises, who may have fled or died, I don’t know which… Forgive me for not taking you there, but I’m pulled in the opposite direction, and I would like to reach the Sierra in time for supper.”

He hadn’t walked so much in Madrid in a long time, not since he was young and conscientiously saved the few céntimos of carfare. Perhaps that was why he remembered the long walk he took from the cemetery after his mother’s funeral on what had then been the uninhabited edge of the city; one step after another, just like now, head down, with the solitary determination to get somewhere and be somebody. He’d felt fatigue but also energy, the mad euphoria of oxygen pumped into his brain by the muscular effort and rhythm of his steps; the sensation of being a transient stripped of any resemblance to the people who passed by and never saw him, alone in the world, as he’d been then, walking through a city that was his own but also alien to him, just as he had passed the windows of toy stores or bookstores or clothing stores and stared at things inaccessible to him. As a child he looked with horror at the world around him, a world of death and hunger, the curse of poverty, bare feet in winter, bare heads white with ringworm, bodies crippled, deformed, as if they belonged to another species yet living a few minutes away from his home. With a childish sense of empathy, but also relief, he was just as aware of his similarity to those unfortunate boys at the margins of society as he was of the privilege that saved him from sharing their fate. But he was not aware of how different he was from the others, those who received electric trains, regiments of lead soldiers in brilliantly colored uniforms, toy theaters, magic lanterns: those children he saw playing, watched over by uniformed maids, in the gardens of the Eastern Palace or riding in a cart pulled by a goat wearing a bridle with bells; those who looked at him with a smile of curiosity or disdain when he shared a classroom with them in the Piarist Academy, whispering behind his back that he was a porter’s son. Some, in time, he met again in the School of Architecture, and the smile hadn’t changed, or it appeared when someone new got wind of the gossip: his mother had been a porter — or even worse, a washerwoman — in the Manzanares (she did that when she was young, long before he was born), his father a construction foreman or a mason or one of those mule drivers who transported rubble from demolitions to garbage dumps. One of Adela’s relatives had called him a fugitive from the scaffolding. A fugitive now from he didn’t know what or whom, on the sidewalk of the Glorieta de Bilbao where Negrín had dropped him, carried along by circumstances, like so many people in Madrid and in all of Spain, from one side to the other of fractured battlefronts, as unpredictable as chasms in an earthquake, carried down the stairs to the tunnels of the metro by the crowd, rushing to the doors that opened when the train arrived, bodies too close repelled him, jammed together in a hostile silence, everyone afraid, resistant to propaganda, even less believable in this subterranean world than in the open air and light of day. Carried along by forces beyond his control, he still didn’t feel that he had any excuse or that his powerlessness gave him an alibi. Always a fugitive deep down, but now more than ever: eager to recover his children even if he had to cross the lines to the other side (the children he’d abandoned on the afternoon of July 19); eager to leave Spain and escape the general disaster or at least the ultimate fate of so many others — Professor Rossman, perhaps, if he didn’t find him — as if they were in a sinister lottery. His mind whirled in a monologue accelerated by a sense of feverishness; he was wearing himself out circling around Madrid. He emerged from the metro on the corner of the Bank of Spain, which he’d passed only an hour earlier, the great granite edifice covered up past the gratings by a flood of posters. JOIN THE PEOPLE’S GLORIOUS AND INVINCIBLE BATALLION AND IT WILL CARRY YOU TO VICTORY! Silhouettes of tall Soviet blast furnaces, hammers and sickles, a fist crushing a plane adorned with a swastika, an army officer wearing gold braid, a Falangist with the mouth of an ogre. WORKER! BY JOINING THE COLUMN OF IRON YOU STRENGTHEN THE REVOLUTION. Around the entrance to the metro swarmed a crowd of beggars, peddlers of lottery tickets and cigarettes and lighter flints, of revolutionary color pictures mixed with the old religious ones, of postcards and rumpled pornographic magazines, barefoot boys hawking the first afternoon papers with the usual report of the imminent capture of the Alcázar de Toledo. TO ATTACK IS TO CONQUER! EVERYONE TO THE ATTACK LIKE A SINGLE BODY! WITH OUR BLOOD WE WILL WRITE THE MOST SUBLIME PAGE IN THE GLORIOUS HISTORY OF MADRID! Among the people strolling that afternoon through the gardens and sitting at café tables beneath the plantain trees, he recognized the proud back and neck of his brother-in-law Víctor. Instead of crossing the street where Negrín had told him he’d find the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals, he rushed to catch up with Víctor, who had turned his head to one side, as if he’d sensed someone following him. With his skin tanned and a beard of several days, Víctor was hard to recognize.

“You gave me a fright, brother-in-law. Keep walking. What’s going on?”

“What are you still doing in Madrid?”

“What about you?”

“I’m looking for a friend.”

“Walk faster. Aren’t you going to denounce me?”

“I thought you would have left.”

“It’s not worth it anymore. Our forces will be here soon. And those of us still here have a great deal to do.”

“What a fool you are. You could hide.”

“It’s what I’m doing right now, if you don’t get in the way. In the light of day and among people, I’m in no danger. You wouldn’t want me to hide like a rabbit in his burrow, waiting for them to hunt me down.”

“Do you have any news of the family?”

“Don’t stop, damn it, keep walking! Don’t look to the side. A patrol is on the corner asking for papers.”

“Do you have any?”

“I’m sure you do, now that your side’s in charge.”

Out of the corner of his eye Ignacio Abel saw the militiamen at the end of the path. Turning around now would be dangerous for Víctor. Perhaps if they continued walking and he showed his credentials, they wouldn’t suspect his companion. A rowdy group of children surrounded a peanut vendor’s cart pulled by a little donkey. From a small brass pipe wafted the delicious aroma of freshly roasted peanuts. The vendor advertised his merchandise by singing outlandish rhymes as he mixed the contents of the portable oven with a small scoop or filled narrow cones of wrapping paper. One of the militiamen held a rifle horizontally. The other examined the documents of a couple with their arms entwined. The smoke from the peanut cart drifted into Ignacio Abel’s face when he took out his wallet. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them Víctor was no longer beside him.

“The revolution is a necessary surgery,” Bergamín said to him, his palms held together before his lean, closely shaven face, in a gloomy office with collections of weapons and leather-bound books on shelves of dark wood, where, when the door was closed, you could barely hear the noise of typewriters and voices in other offices and the constant rhythm of the printing presses.

I see the address on a map and walk up a narrow street behind Cibeles, Marqués de Duero, until I find number 7: a gate, a brick building with a Mudéjar-style roof, an iron-and-glass marquee over the entrance stairway, where Ignacio Abel walked in and saw, in the midst of a throng of busy people loading bundles of newspapers onto a truck, a fair-haired, smiling man with a fleshy face that looked familiar, though he couldn’t quite identify it, perhaps because he was dressed as a militiaman, in a spotless blue coverall and gleaming leather straps, a camera hanging from his shoulder instead of a rifle. When he got closer he realized it was the poet Alberti, whose eyes rested for a moment on him, alternately acute and absent, perhaps because Alberti knew vaguely who he was but didn’t consider it essential to greet him. He asked for Bergamín, saying he’d come on behalf of Bergamín’s brother the architect, and a short female secretary wearing a belt with a pistol in a leather holster led him to an office. Bergamín did remember him: in recent years he’d published some of Ignacio Abel’s articles in Cruz y Raya. I can almost see him, as if I myself had sat down in front of him and cleared my throat and swallowed before I stated, assessing the right tone, the reason for my visit: the methodical men who took away Professor Rossman after searching his room. Bergamín is thinner, more emaciated than ever, his nose more pointed, the tip damp and red from a cold that forced him to blow it from time to time, his eyes smaller beneath thick eyebrows, his voice weak, nasal, his black hair straight, parted down the middle.

“… the cut, of necessity, has to be bloody,” he says and inhales, “but what counts is not the spilled blood in and of itself but the smoothness of the operation. There is always more than enough blood, as our enemies take care to remind us, and they have no misgivings about spilling it. You’ve heard about the rivers of blood flowing where they’ve won — in Sevilla, in Granada, in Badajoz. The moral scruples that paralyze us don’t exist for them. So what should concern us at this glorious and tragic moment is not the volume of blood being spilled on account of the revolution but its success, and on this point it definitely is possible to have doubts. The Spanish people are behaving with an instinct for justice appropriate to the spirit of the race, but also with an anarchy that is equally atavistic and can turn against itself if we don’t channel it. What a talent for improvisation, a superior instinct, even in the language. Suddenly there are new words and expressions that seem to have always been there. What genius of farce thought up that verbal marvel of ‘taking for a ride’? Or ‘to lance someone’—the bottomless quarry of bullfighting speech that’s at the very heart of what is irreducibly Spanish. Don’t make a face. I lament the excesses as much as you do, but how trivial they are compared to the great good sense of the people’s instinctive heroism, and in any case we weren’t the ones who started this war, it’s just that the weight of the blood falls on the accomplices of those who provoked it. Don’t be shocked at the blood or the flames. It was necessary. Obligatory. Defense, not injury, on our part. I remember the article in which you celebrated the marvelous capacity of popular Spanish architecture to adapt. Isn’t the same thing happening now? The Spanish people, accustomed to scarcity, make do with what’s at hand. The disloyal army rebels? The people rise up in militias and guerrilla groups, just as they did in 1808 against the French, with the same instinct that had been dormant for more than a century, and they take what they find at hand, make the most ordinary thing epic, the proletarian blue coverall transformed into a new uniform, one without the negative connotation of a military uniform. That’s why I wanted to name our magazine The Blue Coverall. Isn’t that better than the name Neruda gave his, Green Horse? A green horse, if you stop to think about it, is foolishness. The blue coverall is serious. It would be a good idea, come to think of it, if you’d write something for us. It isn’t a good idea to go around asking about a suspect when you’re not adding anything to the cause, you know, when it isn’t obvious you’re as committed to the struggle. The time of pure intellectuals has passed, if in fact it ever existed. Look at the public shame of Ortega, of Marañón, of Baroja, of the miserable felon that Don Miguel de Unamuno turned out to be. I suppose you’ve heard what they did to poor Lorca in Granada.”

“I heard but couldn’t believe it. You hear so many things that sound true and then turn out to be rumors.”

“I see you still have doubts. You suspect our propaganda is overdone and our enemies not as savage as we claim. You retain the humanist scruple about not drawing a definitive line between them and us. You don’t accept that we’re right and all the savagery is theirs. The man who seemed to be above it all howls in Salamanca against the Republic as he licks the spurs of the military and the rings of the bishops, who for him are now the defenders of Christian civilization. Look at what they do when they enter towns in Extremadura, how they behave. The servants of the nation hunt down their compatriots the way the Italians hunted down Negroes in Abyssinia. They’re not after military victory but extermination. And we’re to be remorseful because the people, in their own defense, take justice into their own hands?”

“My friend hasn’t done anything. They took him away because they can take anybody away. I don’t think that’s justice.”

“If he’s innocent, and for me your word is guarantee, you can be sure they’ll release him.”

“Do you know where I can find him?”

Bergamín remained pensive, his elbows on the large mahogany desk, his eyes half closed.

“Are you absolutely sure your friend hasn’t called attention to himself in any way? Is it possible he had contact with the German embassy?”

“He had to leave the country when Hitler came to power. If they didn’t put him in prison, it was because he had earned the Iron Cross in the war.”

“He was a man of clear anti-Fascist sympathies?”

“Why do you say ‘was’?”

“A manner of speaking. Anything specific about the car they took him away in?”

“Nothing. They didn’t show his daughter any credentials, either.”

“In these times, who thinks about credentials? You don’t realize the urgency of the struggle. We can’t allow our enemies to escape us in the name of some outdated legality.”

“Professor Rossman isn’t an enemy.”

“If he isn’t, why have they detained him?”

Ignacio Abel swallowed, shifted uncomfortably in the chair with its faux-medieval filigree, in the office of noble woods and weapons displays that would have impressed his father-in-law.

“Because they detain anybody. They go around in requisitioned cars, imagining they’re gangsters in a movie, and the names they’ve given themselves — Eagles of the Republic, Dawn Patrol, Red Justice. Don’t tell me that’s any way to do things, Bergamín. No police, no Assault Guards? They stop you on the street, they put a rifle to your chest, and sometimes they can’t even read the name on the card.”

“Do you consider yourself superior to a soldier of the people because you had the privilege of being taught to read and write? It’s the people who impose their law now, and we, people like you and me, have the option of joining them or disappearing along with the class into which we were born. The people are so generous in their victory that they are giving us a possibility of redemption as radical as the one Jesus Christ brought in his day.”

“What victory? Each day that passes, the enemy is closer to Madrid.”

He wanted to add: I wasn’t born into the same class as you; your father was a minister in King Alfonso XIII’s court and mine a construction foreman; you were born in a big house on the Plaza de la Independencia and I in a porter’s apartment on Calle Toledo. But he said nothing. He swallowed again, sat erect in the carved chair, the knot of his tie pressing against his neck. Bergamín wiped his nose, rubbed his hands together gently, looked at Ignacio Abel for a moment over the baroque expanse of his desk, with its leather cover and pseudo-antique writing materials — false inkwells and silver pens and letter openers shaped like Toledan daggers — and piles of proofs under the title The Blue Coverall. He spoke as if he were reciting one of the lead articles he dictated each day to a secretary, pacing from one side of the office to the other, pleased by the creak of his leather boots, sometimes pausing, lost in thought, beside the leaded-glass window that overlooked the palace courtyard.

“I respect you, Abel. I like the articles you’ve written for us, and my brother has spoken highly of your work and assured me you’re an absolute Republican. But don’t place your trust in that. Nowadays there’s no room for the niceties and finickiness of the old bourgeois politics with its tepidities and legalisms. It wasn’t the people who set the bonfire in which all of Spain is burning today, but it will be the people who emerge triumphant from this battle and will dictate the terms of victory. There’s no place for defeatists, no coddling of the lukewarm. Are errors and excesses committed? Of course. They’re inevitable. They were committed in the French Revolution and in the Russian. When a great river overflows its banks, it carries away everything in its path. Those great canals and hydroelectric plants being built right now in the Soviet Union can’t be made without destroying something. And what sacrifices won’t be necessary to complete the collectivization of agriculture, which we can’t dare to imagine here yet. The Republic attempted a modest agrarian reform and look at how the landowners were up in arms about it, along with their usual servants, the military and the priests. It was the blindness of their own egoism that unleashed their ruin. They began to spill blood, and now blood is falling on them. Think of the passage in the Bible: ‘His blood be on us, and on our children.’”

“But you don’t achieve justice by killing innocents.”

“You’re speaking to me about a legalistic justice of individual innocence and blame. But the forces of history act on a much larger scale, that of the great class struggle. In nature, individuals don’t count, only species. You or I are nothing in isolation, and our personal destiny signifies little unless we join one of the great currents colliding now in Spain. What were we all doing before April of ’31, each absorbed in his own affairs, elaborating chimeras, imagining we were conspiring against the king? Added to the force of the people on April 14, we became part of the flood that overthrew the monarchy. We’re either the people or we’re nothing, the remains of a species destined to perish…”

The telephone rang. Bergamín turned to answer it, nodding as he listened, covering his mouth when he spoke. He hung up and seemed to have difficulty remembering who was sitting across from him. He stood, thin, awkward in an aviator’s leather jacket, incongruous in the office in the late August heat.

“Will you help me find Professor Rossman?”

“Don’t worry. If your friend hasn’t done anything wrong, he’ll show up eventually. I’m not the one to do it, but I give you my word.”

Bergamín must have rung a bell under his desk, because the uniformed secretary with the pistol at her waist appeared at the door.

“Abel,” said Bergamín, not raising his voice, still standing, his thin hands resting on the desk. “Come back soon. We can’t do without men like you. You must help us save the artistic patrimony of the Spanish people. Those savages are destroying it ruthlessly. Besides, the way things are right now, it would be to your advantage to make it obvious where your loyalties lie.”