In the Night of Time

32

STANDING NEAR THE window, Ignacio Abel watches the taillights of the car that brought him to the guesthouse move down the path through the trees. The sound of the engine gradually dissolves in the silence of the woods, where he can hear the dry rapping of a woodpecker. Above the dense treetops a pale blue light remains in the sky, where he can just make out the evening star. The trees are evergreens, pines standing high above the house. He sees no other building, and he doesn’t recall ever being submerged in so profound a silence. Stupefied, relieved, exhausted, hypnotized, he stays in front of the window, his coat still on, holding his hat, in his left hand the pain of having clutched the handle of the suitcase for so long, a gesture as instinctive now as patting his pockets to search for his passport or turning around thinking someone has called his name.

He isn’t accustomed to the idea of having reached his destination. He can’t calculate the exact number of days that have passed since he left Madrid. And he doesn’t remember the day of the week or today’s date, just that it’s near the end of October. Trains, hotels, a ship’s cabin, border crossings, names of stations are confused in his memory, a continuous yet disconnected sequence of places, sensations, faces, days and nights. He isn’t who he was when he started this journey. What for so long had been the sound of a name and a black dot on a map is now what his eyes have seen since he reached the station, what he looks at as he stands at the window: fields where horses or cows graze, wooden houses and fences painted white, barns, narrow roads, autumnal woods where light continues to vibrate in spite of dusk. There will be no ragged refugees fleeing along these roads, no dead horses in the ditches with swollen bellies, no black smoke on the horizon, suitcases tossed beside the highway, their contents plundered or scattered by passing vehicles, the trampling of animals, the flood of refugees. Rhineberg was a promise, an enigma, a place difficult to imagine in Madrid, and now it’s the house in a clearing in the forest with a porch and wooden columns, large rectangular windows without curtains or grilles, built perhaps at the turn of the century by a tycoon whose taste was more neoclassical than Victorian. He’d touched one of the columns when he got out of the car — Professor Stevens had hurried to open the rear doors, first for him, then for Van Doren. The smooth paint and solid wood were soothing to the touch. Like someone who’s just disembarked after a long sea voyage, he feels the firm floorboards vibrating beneath his swollen feet. His body has become accustomed to constant movement: train wheels, iron bridges, turbine pistons continue to buzz in his ears. How distant now the night he left Madrid in the back of a truck, driving along the Valencia highway with its headlights off, surrounded by men who smoked in the darkness or slept leaning on bundles, covering themselves with old blankets and overcoats, clutching the handles of their suitcases. In the passageway of the crowded night train that carried him to Paris, he slept sitting on the floor; a plainclothes policeman woke him with a kick because he was blocking the way, and with ill humor demanded his papers. He got to his feet, fatigued and half asleep, numb with cold. At first he couldn’t find his passport in any of the pockets he patted with increasing alarm. The rough voice repeated, “Papiers, papiers,” and then the policeman thrust his flashlight close to Ignacio Abel’s face to compare it with the passport photograph, his hair smelling of pomade, his breath of tobacco.

Things that just happened, unhinged from the present, plunge into a distant past: his final hours in the apartment he was about to abandon, his departure from Madrid, his journey through France at night, the ocean horizon unchanging for six days, the four days of anxious waiting in New York, the two hours on a train this afternoon along the banks of the Hudson. Instinctively he pats his passport in the inside pocket of his raincoat, as if listening to his heart. No one’s going to ask him for it now, tonight. No one will ask for his papers in America, Van Doren told him when they entered the foyer of the house and he took out his passport. He can empty his pockets and put his things in the desk drawers or the night table with no fear. He can hang his spare suit in the closet so it won’t be too wrinkled when he puts it on tomorrow to go to his first, and dreaded, social engagement, after sinking into a bathtub full of hot water for the first time in he doesn’t remember how long and shaving and combing his hair at the mirror above the sink, respectable again, an architect, a visiting professor. But he doesn’t do anything yet: physically he’s reached his destination, but his body holds the tension of the journey, the instinct to distrust, to keep vigilant. Standing at the window, Ignacio Abel drinks in the novelty of stillness and silence while the car’s taillights glow like two live coals in the growing darkness of the trees. He’s safe from immediate uncertainties. No urgent deadline, no train to catch. He won’t hear footsteps tonight on the wooden steps that go up to the bedroom, and when he falls asleep no one will wake him by pounding on the door. The house has welcomed him with cordial austerity: the amplitude of the spaces, the bareness of the walls painted a light cream color, the suggestion of strength in the materials transmitted by touch to his hands when they brush the banister, to his body through his soles resting on wooden boards. Solid beams and powerful columns made of large tree trunks; stone foundations sunk into the fertile dark earth to the depths of living rock. From the car he observed the outcroppings of that rock and liked the variations in color, not as dark as the schist in Central Park: a greenish gray like patinaed bronze that corresponds subtly to the colors of the trees. In his legs there’s a trace of vibration, in his temples the buzz of electric cables. “The entire house is for you,” Philip Van Doren told him before he left, with a proprietary expression (he’s probably the owner, or was: someone in his family gave the building to the college). “I’ve made certain there’ll be no other guests in the next few days. Light the fire, use the library, play the piano, cook your supper. There’s more than enough food in the refrigerator and pantry. There’s stationery, and ink in the inkwells. There’s a typewriter, and a good record player in the library, and a collection of records. Rubinstein played that piano only a few months ago. You must have the impression that at Burton College we live like pioneers in the middle of these woods, but you’ll see how many eminent guests visit. There’s a good radio, though I’m afraid not good enough to pick up Spanish broadcasts…”

In the distance he hears the noise of a train that takes a long time to pass, coming up the bank of the Hudson emitting the sound of a ship’s siren. He can’t believe he’s not riding in that train, that he doesn’t have before him the urgency and uncertainty of another trip, doesn’t have to anticipate any sudden fright, or find he’s lost, or know he’s anonymous. In the car, to flatter him, Stevens cited his articles in international architectural magazines, and Ignacio Abel had the feeling he was hearing about someone else. So many years of study, work, ambition, and vanity dissolve into empty hands, hands with dirty nails protruding from the worn cuffs of a shirt he hasn’t changed in several days. One morning, his feet aching from walking around New York, he sat down on a sunny bench in Union Square and thought no one could distinguish him from the other solitary, honorably poor men who read the help-wanted pages in the newspapers or pawed through trash baskets. He looked up and a banner hanging between two lampposts trembled in the gentle October breeze: SUPPORT THE STRUGGLE OF THE SPANISH PEOPLE AGAINST FASCIST AGGRESSION.

It’s a relief to be left alone in the house and not have any engagements scheduled for tonight. The banner in Union Square announced a meeting that evening in support of the Spanish Republic. If Judith was in New York, she’d probably attend. Tomorrow morning Stevens will take him around the campus and show him, if he’s not too tired, the hill and the clearing in the woods where, in not too long a time, everyone in the college hopes, the new Van Doren Library will be built (perhaps not white after all, too visible; perhaps the color of the rocks that peek out of cultivated land, or of the stone walls in the woods that marked old farm boundaries). In the evening the college president will give a dinner in his honor for a select group of guests (Stevens smiles, as if uncertain whether he’s among them). In a few days he’ll be assigned convenient housing for the entire year, closer to campus. But today he doesn’t have to worry about anything, Stevens said, turning to him as he drove with one hand along those country roads he knows by heart; just rest up after the long journey. (Stevens looks at him and speaks to him as if he were ill, he thinks, uncertain of the tone he should use with a man who’s just left a country at war, a distant European suffering that for him must have something exotic about it.) And he shouldn’t be frightened if he hears strange noises at night, his host says afterward, as they’re saying goodbye, and Ignacio Abel understands that Stevens has repeated the identical joke to other guests: the house is old, and at night the wooden structure tends to creak, but he can be sure it isn’t bewitched, It’s not a haunted house as far as we know, though it’s possible some forest animal may approach, a ferret, a deer. On winter nights, bears and wolves are on the prowl. What a relief to hear the outside door close and the car drive away as the taillights begin to fade. He remains still, the weariness of the past few hours and so many days dissolving into a muscular weakness, his eyes charmed by the landscape at the window, the forest of tall conifers where night has fallen beyond the clearing in which the house stands, the sky of gradually darkening blue, and against it the treetops outlined with precision, the branches curved upward like the roofs of pagodas. Ignacio Abel has never experienced a silence like this. The silence is a crystal bell, a vault under which the most cautious footstep, the lightest touch, would have resonated. His hotel room in New York faced a gloomy courtyard where machinery rumbled night and day, and at regular intervals the walls and floor shook because an elevated train passed nearby. (In his sleeplessness he’d count the days he had to wait, the amount of money he’d spent since leaving Madrid, how much he had left.) The silence has a depth, an oceanic extension as limitless as these woods, which must extend, he imagines, to the cold of the Arctic Circle, to the Great Lakes and Niagara Falls, to the shores where at this moment the Atlantic is pounding. The silence weighs so powerfully it muffles the voices that haven’t stopped sounding in his memory in recent days. Before leaving, Stevens turns on the lamp on the night table like a bellboy presenting the room to a recently arrived guest: he shows him the bathroom, how the hot and cold water faucets work. When the stream of water hits the bathtub it gives off steam. He opens a closet that emits a scent of varnish and pine. Stevens moves with agility, a hysterical touch of speed, like a dancer dressed in street clothes in a movie musical. His red face, his blue eyes behind gold wire-frame glasses, he is always conscious of the ironic or censorious or simply disdainful presence of Philip Van Doren, before whom he acts as if he were constantly being subjected to an aptitude test for which he’s not prepared; more anxious when Van Doren is silent, when without saying a word he makes his displeasure or approval known with a fleeting expression the inexpert observer may not perceive. In the kitchen Professor Stevens explains how the coffeepot and toaster work while Ignacio Abel absent-mindedly nods without understanding very much, impatient to be alone, his feet hurting under the weight of his body. After so many days without a real conversation, it’s difficult for him to pay attention to Stevens’s chatter or Van Doren’s comments and to respond coherently in English.

He inspects the bedroom, slowly becomes conscious of every detail, the high bed with its plain wooden headboard, plump white pillows, a white quilt on which he left his unopened suitcase. Pressing on the soft quilt is like submerging his hand in deep, warm, still water. He regains the pleasure of starched bed linen, fragrant sheets, the warm shelter of domestic comfort. How would it be to have Judith Biely with him in this room — Judith who perhaps right now is somewhere on this continent of dark forests undulating beyond the window. How would his children have explored the house, Miguel and Lita chasing each other on the stairs, going out into the woods to imagine they were living in a novel by James Fenimore Cooper, a film about soldiers in long jackets and three-cornered hats and Indians with tomahawks and stiff crests of hair and painted faces. There’s a wide, solid desk of varnished wood in front of the window. When he turns on the brass lamp with a green shade that stands on it, the darkness of the landscape becomes a mirror in which he sees his face, partially in shadow, against the background of the room. Who has seen you and who sees you? Who would recognize you now? His face with the rough shadow of a beard, an edge of grime on his shirt collar, his tie carelessly knotted. The face Van Doren and Stevens have seen, which he has detected behind their courtesy. From a distance comes the sound of a train that takes a long time to pass: lit windows through the trees, reflected in the ocean-like current of the river. In Madrid night fell hours ago and it’s still a long time until daybreak. The tremor of battle goes on in the distance and darkness, just like the sound of the train. REBEL FORCES EXPECTED TO FURTHER TIGHTEN THEIR GRIP ON LOYALIST CAPITAL, a newspaper headline said yesterday or the day before. Standing in front of the window, Ignacio Abel empties his pockets onto the desk: train tickets, hotel bills, French and Spanish coins, American pennies, receipts from Automats in New York, pencil stubs, the telegram from Stevens that reached the hotel after three days, when he thought he’d be thrown out for lack of payment, loose one-franc bills, a wrinkled five-peseta note, the few dollars to which his entire capital has been reduced. Forgotten things, like archeological remains of a lost time: the keys to his apartment in Madrid, two movie tickets from an afternoon in early June, the letter he decided several times to tear up and yet has kept, Dear Ignacio, allow me to call you that, despite everything. I’m your wife and have the right and still love you. Adela’s letter and Judith’s, his wallet swollen and misshapen by use, Judith’s photo next to one of his children, his Socialist Party card, the General Union of Workers card, his identity document, his notebook with the first sketches for the library, lines and pencil smudges, uncertain attempts at forms that have become irrelevant in the context of the power and scale of this landscape: what can he design that won’t be trivial and ridiculous, his Spanish imagination nullified here, just as it is in New York City, by the excessive size conspicuous both in human works and in nature, requiring an energy, a spirit, a lack of restraint for which he isn’t prepared. He’s been alone in the room for a while and still isn’t calmed by its spaciousness or its silence. He sees himself as a foreign body, potentially infectious, propagating disorder, smells that have clung to his clothing during his journey, dirty clothes now turned out of the open suitcase on the bed and things spilling out of his pockets onto the desk, the silence oppressing him, the external darkness increasing the dimensions of distance.

A metallic noise wakes him, blows from a hammer or monkey wrench, steam whistles. In fractions of a second his mind, alert but still disoriented, eliminates a succession of places: his bedroom in Madrid, the tiny cabin on the ship, the hotel room in New York, the one in Paris. With the sudden shock of antiquated pipes, the heat has come on. He remembers dreaming about voices that dissolve before he can identify them. One said his name amid the noise of a crowd, murmured it in his ear; another begged for his help on the other side of a closed door. Ignacio, for the sake of all you love best, open the door. What he has no memory of is lying down on top of the quilt, not taking off his shoes, covering himself with his raincoat, as if he’d gone to sleep on a bench in a waiting room. He is aware of his body but sees it from the outside. He knows that if he so decides, he can lift the hand resting on his chest or open his eyelids a little more or close them again or bend a leg, but he does nothing, and in this inaction is a kind of indifference or physical distance, as if the neural connections between brain and muscles had temporarily been suspended. It isn’t that he’s lost feeling, as when a limb goes numb in a cramped position. He notes the pressure of his body on the quilt and the heat of his hands, one on the other, notes the thin weight of his lids on his eyeballs. His body is heavy and at the same time it floats on the quilt that’s both dense and light. His body is heavy but not his thoughts, not the flow of consciousness or his perception of things. At some point as he slept and the night thickened, the woodpecker’s beak stopped striking the tree trunk, but the owl’s call or hoot did not; it returned, identical, after longer intervals of silence. Is this how it is to be dead, when the heart has stopped but there remains, so they say, a final glimmer of lucidity in the brain, when the bullet’s just torn open the chest or the severed head’s fallen into the guillotine basket? If only Professor Rossman had known a last moment of pity like this one, lying face-up on the ground, his lifeless body resting on the great breadth of the earth, beyond fear and pain, beneath a summer sky at dawn. Inside his shoes, Ignacio Abel’s feet are swollen now and more painful, as if each foot weighs the millions of steps taken on his journey. The air enters his nostrils and leaves an instant later, warmer, the temperature of breath. In a rhythm just as involuntary, his heart contracts and expands in his chest, the waves of blood in his ears, the pulsation in his temples, a pressure in his skull that isn’t quite a headache.

Who has seen you and who sees you? Who are you tonight, suspended in a place too strange and distant to be grasped in this large empty house, in this ocean of silence, this dark forest where the light from your windows travels to the highway? In his sleep he heard trains passing, as they’d passed during siestas and on summer nights in the Sierra, going to and coming from Madrid, the express trains heading north at midnight and those approaching the capital close to dawn after a night in transit. And the slow, short-distance trains too, that didn’t go beyond Segovia and Ávila, the ones the fathers took during the summer to go to work in Madrid and return to the Sierra on Saturday afternoon, so recognizable, in their light suits and straw hats and briefcases under their arm, among travelers from the villages, dark unshaven faces, women with black scarves and kerchiefs on their heads, rustic wares of traveling vendors, containers of honey they’d peddle on the streets of Madrid, canvas sacks filled with cheeses, cages of hens, recently weaned piglets. It seemed that everything had lasted forever and would always be that way, the passage and whistle of trains as regular as the course of the sun or the bells in the village church. Now trains don’t pass close to the house, shaking the pavement and the windows every hour. Now the old, slow trains that summer people and campesinos rode leave Madrid crowded with noisy militiamen, slogans painted on the cars and banners hanging from the locomotives, and they travel only half their route, to the last stations on this side of the Sierra, almost at the front. It’s only October and the militiamen are already shivering with cold when night falls. Not enough blankets, said Negrín, no wool clothing, or hats, or boots, not enough trucks to keep the front supplied with food and ammunition, and no guaranteed relief forces. The heavy pain of Spanish poverty: in the photos of staged heroism published in the newspapers, the men advance or drop to the ground, dressed in old jackets or helmets that seem the castoffs of different armies. They shiver at night in the shelter of shepherds’ huts, in the hollows between large granite crags. How will it be if the war hasn’t ended when winter comes? They don’t light fires so as not to give their positions away to the enemy. They hear noise, and fire into the darkness, wasting scant ammunition; for no reason, the shooting spreads up and down the frontline. On the other side his children must hear it, the house is close to the lines, to the names of towns now the lexicon of war. No doubt the family has gone to Segovia: suddenly almost another country, an inverted image of the Bolshevik and Anarchist Madrid that sprang up overnight late in July; military men and priests on the streets, processions of saints, not parades with red flags, the open hands of the Fascist salute instead of clenched fists, the ecclesiastical severity of the Spanish provinces in the previous century. My children in that world, unavoidably swallowed up by a clerical darkness from which I won’t be able to rescue them, by candles, novenas, scapulars, and cassocks into which their mother’s family submerged them as soon as I became careless, or as soon as I desisted, too weak, lacking the necessary intransigence, compelled by Adela, by her obedience to her people, unless in her heart she shares it too and hasn’t shown it openly in order not to oppose me, not to emphasize the abyss that separated us from the start, the misunderstanding that neither of us wanted to look at, two strangers who have children in common and share nothing but a bed, a resignation indistinguishable from boredom. It’s never mattered to you that I love you, and you’ve never shown gratitude for the affection my parents gave you and have felt only contempt for them—the letter also on the desk now, within reach, almost memorized, hidden inside the envelope and distilling from so great a distance its constant complaint. In Segovia Don Francisco de Asís owns a house with a coat of arms carved in stone above the lintel of the street door; he calls it “my ancestral home,” though in reality it isn’t very old and came into his possession many years ago at an auction, and the stone coat of arms with a shield crowned by a helmet and a cross of Santiago he bought at a demolition site. You leave and it’s useless, you wear out the soles of your shoes walking through city after city, you spend a week nauseated in a cramped cabin on a ship that crosses the Atlantic, and it’s as if you had lost your strength in one of those revolving tunnels at a carnival, the tube of laughter, you never manage to move from the same spot. You go away and one part of you remains torn by separation and guilt, and the other part suffers the oppression of not being able to leave, to create distance. Continents and oceans can’t loosen the knots of captivity. Because you must know that whatever you do you’re still my husband and the father of your children. Those ties can never be broken. Not even animals abandon their young. From so far away he sees them, like the photographs in which he never appears though he’s hovering nearby, conferring in the familial circle around a table with built-in foot warmers in the house in Segovia, with gloomy paintings of saints on the walls, Don Francisco de Asís and Doña Cecilia and Adela and his two children and perhaps the uncle who is a priest, and who gives religious pictures to the children and suggests they pray at night and go to Confession and take Communion, if only to make their dear grandparents happy. He sees them like a ghost, a soul in purgatory in whom Doña Cecilia says she believes and to whom she lights little oil lamps that according to her go out when touched by the passage of a soul, the wing of an angel. The most sacred thing of all isn’t the sacraments, but the love you and I have had, our children are the proof. They all pray the rosary, murmuring, their heads lowered, Miguel and Lita kicking each other, Don Francisco de Asís and Doña Cecilia and Adela offering fervent prayers for their son and brother, not knowing whether he’s alive or dead, and perhaps also for him, the son-in-law, who disappeared on July 19, though with some misgivings, because it disconcerts them or they think it’s unsuitable to pray for someone who has no faith, but they must set an example for the children, they who are severe in their mourning for the two who are absent and about whom they’ve heard nothing for months, the son and brother, the husband and son-in-law to whom Adela wrote the letter, run through with rancor, that’s taken so long to reach its destination and yet hits its target with the accuracy of a poisoned arrow. Why is it bad for your children, who are just as much mine as yours, or even more mine because I gave birth to them, I brought them up and have been there for them every day, every night when they were burning up with fever, what harm can it do them to be brought up in the Catholic faith? Her family will indoctrinate the children, they’ll fall again into the hands of priests and nuns, they’ll be forced to confess and take Communion on Sundays and perhaps they’ll be pointed at in the school where they’ve begun the new year as secular children, offspring of an enemy, who don’t know how to chant prayers or sing church hymns, not to mention the Fascist anthems.

Ignacio Abel lies in bed, exhausted, silent, as memory acquires clarity in the midst of his loneliness and guilt. He travels with the lightness of dreams to the house in the Sierra, past which the trains no longer run and from which perhaps the gunfire on the front can be heard. Perhaps it’s been abandoned or converted into a barracks, like the Student Residence, a barracks for the others, for that abstract and not completely human species the newspapers call the Enemy, a word, he realizes now, of theological inspiration. In his old school, transformed into a lot with burned ruins, the priests called the devil the Enemy and warned that the word must always be written with a capital letter. Now the Enemy must occupy the neglected garden that for his children was a forest where they staged adventures copied from novels and collected insects and plants for their biology classes; the garden with the rusted swing on which they were swinging on that Sunday three months ago when he saw them for the last time, though they were both too old for it. Lita with her well-formed chest, Miguel in short pants he won’t wear again after this summer. He’s changing so quickly that when I see him again I won’t recognize him. He’ll have the shadow of a mustache, he’ll part his hair and brush back the bangs that would fall over his eyes, an adolescent who’ll look more like his uncle Víctor, his features usurped along with his soul, distancing him from me into an adulthood in which perhaps I, his father, won’t exist. If I haven’t already ceased to exist, erased by distance, lack of news, the likely absence of the postcards I’ve been sending them since I left Madrid, just as when they were younger and I took trips: the Plaza de la República in Valencia, the beach at Malvarrosa, the Eiffel Tower, the recently inaugurated Trocadero, Notre-Dame from a bridge over the Seine, the Boulevard de Saint-Nazaire that ends at the port, the SS Manhattan sailing at night on the high seas with the portholes illuminated and garlands of bulbs over the deck, the Statue of Liberty, the arcades at Pennsylvania Station, the hotel in New York where I stayed, its vertical sign running along the side of the building and a small pencil mark over a window on the fourteenth floor, this is my room, the Empire State Building crowned by a dirigible (but he never managed to mail that postcard: he stamped it and forgot about it in his concern not to miss the train). Lita has a tin box filled with postcards and letters arranged by date. At the beginning of her vacation she took it to the Sierra along with her books and journals. Miguel brought with him the textbooks for the classes he’d failed in June and the notebooks with assignments he’d done at the last minute, covered with the teacher’s red-pencil markings, his spelling mistakes underlined, his inkblots. But he couldn’t have taken his examinations in September. In that regard the war has been a respite for him. He’ll have to repeat the year, and Lita will too if the war doesn’t end soon.

It’s no longer possible to avoid the word: he saw it in the French papers, obscene in the red and black ink of the headlines: GUERRE EN ESPAGNE. He’s seen it in the New York papers he sometimes worriedly looked for — and other times tried to avoid — at the stand outside his hotel: LATEST NEWS ON THE WAR IN SPAIN. Like a congenital illness he can’t be cured of, and those who printed and delivered the papers were immune to, like our poverty and picturesque backwardness, our baroque Virgins with glass tears and silver hearts pierced by daggers, and that colorful, savage slaughterhouse that is our national pastime. KILLINGS AT THE BULLFIGHT RING IN BADAJOZ. Our names, so sonorous and exotic, standing out among the words of another language, thatched walls in ruins, barren lands, photographs of our poor people’s war, our women with black shawls and bundles on their heads fleeing along roads, crossing the plains, shoved with rifle butts at the frontier by French gendarmes while I looked away and did nothing and felt the cruel privilege of my formal dress and my papers in order. That still didn’t exempt me from the Spanish disease: the customs officials searched my suitcase with calculated rudeness, took their time examining my drawings and sketches, the passport they’d already gone over once, the photograph I was beginning not to resemble, the page with the U.S. visa. Who’d accept without suspicion that title, Spanish Republic, inscribed in gold letters on the cover above the shield with its mural crown, if at any moment that republic might cease to exist, and if a few steps away, on the Spanish side of the border, there were no uniformed guards and clerks but militiamen who’d hauled down the tricolor and hoisted a red-and-black banner on the flagpole. In spite of everything, while he waited, dignified and upright, for the gendarmes to return his passport and permit him to close his suitcase, there was his pride at being a citizen of the Spanish Republic and rage at the indifference of the French and British who watched it turn, awkward and defenseless, to face its attackers, but also the feeling of inferiority for belonging to such a country, and the desire to escape it, and guilt for having run away, for not having known how to be useful, for not having remedied anything.

He remembers being on the Plaza de Oriente one morning, the last one, when his escape was assured and he went to say goodbye to Moreno Villa. Lashed by wind and rain, the plaza looked larger, the National Palace more gray than white against the background of dark storm clouds coming out of the west over the sharp greens of the Campo del Moro, with the Casa de Campo dissolving in the fog. In the French gardens an encampment of refugees protected themselves from the rain under their carts or canvas cloths stretched between the hedges and trees. In the middle of October, winter announced its arrival in Madrid, as if brought there by the gradually approaching war along the southwest highway, the one to Extremadura. How strange to imagine with such clarity what I haven’t lived, what happened more than seventy years ago, the plaza with the encampment of tarpaulins and shanties among the hedges, around the equestrian statue of Felipe IV supported only by the hind legs, delicate against the gray sky and the rain, wielding a sodden red flag; Ignacio Abel walking by it, a solitary bourgeois silhouette under an umbrella, approaching the guardpost where soldiers in the impeccable uniforms of the presidential battalion — steel helmets, leather straps, shining boots, well-shaven faces — will let him pass with no more formality than checking his name on a typed list. Footsteps and orders echoed in the granite cavities of the foyer. In a porter’s lodge behind a small glass door, one could hear a radio and a typewriter and smell the aroma of food. He climbed broad staircases of granite and then of marble that had no carpeting to muffle his steps. He crossed halls with tapestries and clocks and swirling mythological scenes painted on the ceilings, and bare corridors that led to courtyards with stone arches covered by glass domes on which the rain drummed. Moreno Villa was in an office behind a paneled door with a low lintel, a tiny office overrun by books and file folders in the middle of a magnificence of empty spaces. Ignacio Abel thought that throughout his life Moreno Villa had maintained an invariable model of a workroom, identical in the National Palace and the Student Residence, in any place where chance might lead him in a future that had suddenly become uncertain. The cold was insidious, slowly overpowering you, first your fingertips and the end of your nose, then the soles of your feet. In a corner of the office was a small electric heater. But the current was weak and the glow of the element as sickly as in the lamp on the desk where Moreno worked, absorbed in his files, his investigations into the buffoons and madmen who served the kings in the time of Velázquez. His white beard had grown pointed, like a figure by El Greco. He was thinner than in the summer, and wore reading glasses that made him look older.

“You’re finally leaving, Abel. You must find it hard to believe you have all your papers in order. It’s obvious you’re a man who wants to leave, who knows how to leave, if you’ll allow me to say so.”

“Are you still sleeping in the Residence?”

“And where would I sleep if I didn’t sleep there, Abel? It’s my home. My provisional home, but I’ve lived there so many years I can’t imagine myself anywhere else. The garrison is gone and now they’ve set up a field hospital. How those poor boys scream. The horrible wounds. You think you know war’s dreadful but have no idea of anything until you see it. Imagination is useless, impotent, cowardly. We see soldiers fall in films and believe that’s how it is, that everything’s over quickly, a bloodstain on the chest. But there are things worse than dying. Tell me what kind of insanity that is — what’s the good of such suffering? You look away, because when you look, you’ll retch. And the smell, my God! The smell of gangrene and excrement from burst intestines. The smell of blood when the nurses cover them with newspapers or sawdust. Sometimes I tell myself I’ll have to draw these things, but I don’t know how, it makes me ashamed to attempt it. I think no one has done it, no one has dared, not the Germans in the Great War, and not Goya. Goya got closer, but even he lacked the courage. I think of the caption he put on one of the prints in Disasters of War: ‘One cannot look.’ You won’t have to any longer.”

He didn’t need to go on waiting. He was there saying goodbye to Moreno Villa and it was as if he’d already begun the journey, postponed so many times because of tortuous procedures, papers or stamps or signatures, promised letters, delayed or lost in the mail. Before going to see Moreno Villa he’d picked up the final document and carried it like a fragile treasure in the inside pocket of his jacket, a safe-conduct on the letterhead of the Ministry of Finance, signed by Negrín in his new position as minister, authorizing the trip to Valencia and from there to France and suggesting a vague official mission — in case new difficulties arose and his passport with the American visa and the French transit visa wasn’t enough when he reached the border. “We’re a government that almost doesn’t exist,” Negrín told him in his large office in the Ministry of Finance. He finally had a space that corresponded to his physical size, with an enormous desk, a large window facing Calle de Alcalá, a thick rug into which footsteps sank silently. “We give orders to an army of phantom divisions in which a handful of officers still loyal to the Republic have no troops to command. They’ve made poor Prieto minister of the navy, but the few old warships the Republic has are lost, and we don’t know where they are because the sailors killed the officers and threw them in the ocean and didn’t leave anyone who knows how to read a nautical chart or set a course. We write decrees that no one obeys. We’re unable to control the borders of our own country. Governments that should be our allies want nothing to do with us. We send telegrams to our embassies or set up conference calls, and the ambassadors and secretaries have gone over to the enemy. We’re the legitimate government of a member of the League of Nations, and even our French comrades from the Popular Front treat us as if we had the plague. They don’t want their excellent relations with Mussolini and Hitler ruined on our account, not to mention the British, who for some reason despise us more than they do the insurgents. They don’t want to sell us weapons. We have no planes, no tanks, no artillery, and barely a fraction of the materiel left over from the Great War that those thieving French didn’t want and were selling to us until a few months ago. And now not even that, no helmets from 1914 or muskets from the Franco-Prussian War…”

But strangely, Negrín’s lucidity before the magnitude of the catastrophe didn’t dishearten him. When Abel entered his office, he found him dictating a letter in French at top speed to a secretary, walking back and forth, his hands behind his back. He paused to make a call, grew impatient that it took so long to be connected, slammed down the receiver. “Even so, we won’t surrender,” he said, stopping in front of Abel. “We’ll rebuild the army from the bottom up, an effective and well-equipped army, with discipline and muscle, an army of the people and the Republic. We’ll end this madness — reality is the best antidote to mental derangement. We know why the enemy’s fighting and why the military rebelled, but what we don’t know is why we’re fighting. Or if there is a we that we fit into, all of us who’ll end up shot or exiled if the other side wins. Each madman has his mania. Don Manuel Azaña wants the French Third Republic. You and I and a few others like us would settle for a Social Democratic republic like Weimar. But our coreligionist and now president of the government says he wants a Union of Iberian Soviet Republics, and Don Lluís Companys a Catalán republic, and the Anarchists forget we’re at war and facing a bloodthirsty enemy and in this chaos experiment with the abolition of the state. And to put into practice its own particular delirium, the first thing each party and union does is invent its own police, its own prisons, and its own executioners. But I refuse to believe all is lost. Our currency has fallen internationally, but we have more than enough gold and can pay cash for the best weapons. Our sister democracies, as they say in speeches, don’t want to sell them to us? We’ll buy them from the Soviets, or international traffickers, whoever.” The telephone rang: the connection he’d asked for was possible now. He requested something in a categorical way but with the greatest courtesy, and since the secretary who’d been typing the letter took her time removing the paper from the typewriter, Negrín pulled it out himself with a precise gesture and checked the spelling by pushing up his glasses and bringing the letter close to his eyes. “And that’s not all, Abel my friend. Those photographs our militiamen take of themselves dressed like priests in the ruins of burned churches and that do us so much good in the eyes of the world when the newspapers publish them? Those same papers refuse to publish the photographs we send them of children blown to pieces by German planes because they say they’re propaganda. We have no people who speak foreign languages. We send loyal Republicans and Socialists abroad to fill diplomatic posts and explain our cause, but how are they going to explain it if in the best case they never went beyond first-year French in a priests’ academy. This good-looking girl who works with me here is a treasure, she speaks French. But letters in English or German I have to write myself, and if foreign emissaries or journalists come to interview someone in the government, I act as interpreter.” A functionary came in with a document in a folder, which he presented ceremoniously to Negrín, calling him “Señor Minister.” Negrín looked it over quickly before signing it with a flourish and passed it to Ignacio Abel. “If they don’t let you cross with this, I can think of only one measure,” he said, laughing. “You carry a pistol too, just in case, and shoot your way out.” Ignacio Abel carefully folded the safe-conduct and put it in an inside pocket. He remembers now that when he left Negrín’s office, his relief was stronger than his remorse or his gratitude. In the waiting room stood officials, militiamen, and uniformed carabineers. The carabineers came to attention when they saw the minister, who took Ignacio Abel’s arm and accompanied him to the exit. He’s going to ask me not to leave, Abel thought, suddenly frightened, feeling on his arm the pressure of Negrín’s enormous hand; he’s going to remind me that I can speak foreign languages and should offer my services to the Republic just as he’s doing, sacrificing a career far more brilliant than mine, that if he wanted to, he could obtain an appointment at any university outside Spain. But Negrín didn’t ask anything. He ignored Abel’s extended hand, gave him a hug, and told him, laughing, not to take too long with that building in America, come back soon and finish University City once and for all. So many ruins will have to be razed, he said, you architects will turn into gold. He stood for a moment on the threshold of a door with elaborate gilding, then turned and disappeared.

Lying in bed, he relives the sensation of cold drops on his cheeks, on a morning in October that felt like December. He thought of Negrín turning to go back to his office, thought that perhaps he too had been infected by a form of madness. The rain streamed down the tall gray façades on Calle de Alcalá, soaking the torn posters, shreds of wet paper breaking up the slogans in red letters and the figures of heroic militiamen in boots trampling swastikas, bishops’ miters, bourgeois top hats, shirt fronts with medals, workers breaking chains and advancing toward brilliant horizons of factory smokestacks. The peddlers, shoeshine boys, and habitual idlers in the Puerta del Sol took shelter from the rain under the awnings of shops and in the doorways of buildings. The city had become sullen and wintry, and smelled of wet soot, garbanzo and cabbage stew, and overheated air from the metro tunnels. He took refuge in a nearly empty café, waiting behind a window clouded with steam for the rain to let up. The odor of sawdust reminded him of another café several months earlier, equally gloomy at that same hour of the morning, of Judith Biely, who didn’t lift her head as he approached and didn’t get up when he stood beside her, her face transformed into that of a woman who didn’t know him. He couldn’t risk the safe-conduct recently signed by Negrín getting wet. How a life can depend on a sheet of paper, an official letterhead, an ink signature so easily dissolved by a few drops of water. As if they were hidden treasure, he thought of all the papers he already had in his desk drawer, the same locked drawer where he kept Judith’s letters: the documents he’s brought with him and had to present so often during his trip, obtained one by one after exhausting transactions and weeks of waiting, interrogations, lengthy inspections of each document, each stamp and signature on each letter. To apply for the transit visa through France, he had to present his American visa and ticket for the ship as well as a certificate of financial solvency. The letter of invitation from Burton College, which he needed to apply for the American visa, took months to arrive. Most of the personnel at the embassies had left the country; the few officials left were irritated, overwhelmed by applications, insolent with the growing crowd of those who came early every morning and waited for hours in front of the closed doors, each with a briefcase or folder of documents held close to the chest, longing to escape, or at least find refuge in the embassies, looking out of the corner of their eye each time a car with rifle barrels at the windows or a truckload of militiamen went by. He recognized some of the regulars on the lines and in the offices: in a hallway at the French consulate he passed an architect he knew was a rightist, and neither greeted the other; a Russian woman he’d seen several times showed him her worn czarist passport and a diploma in Cyrillic characters issued, she said, by the Imperial Conservatory of Moscow. A contract for teaching piano was waiting for her at the Juilliard School. Couldn’t he, since he looked like a gentleman, help her with a small amount, since she had all the necessary emigration documents and needed only the cost of a third-class passage?

Moreno Villa’s bony hand was cold when he shook it. “You make me envious, Abel, leaving for America, disembarking in New York. I went so many years ago, and it’s as if I had been there yesterday. When you called to say you were coming to say goodbye, I took the liberty of bringing you a present.” He had a book on the desk, and before giving it to him he wrote a dedication on the title page. That copy must be somewhere, on a shelf in a library or a used-book store, the paper brittle after so many years, slightly more valuable because it has a dedication in the cautious hand of Moreno Villa, so similar to the line in his drawings, under the red letters of the title, Proofs of New York: “For Ignacio Abel, in the hope it will be of some help as a guide on his journey, Madrid, October 1936, from his friend J. Moreno Villa.” “It’s one of those books one publishes that no one will read,” he said, as if apologizing. “The advantage is that it’s short. I wrote it on my return trip. You can read it on your trip out. You don’t know the envy I feel.” And like Negrín that morning, Moreno Villa accompanied him to the door, leading him along bare halls and rooms of rococo opulence where at times the strokes of pendulum clocks echoed. They passed several footmen in knee breeches and long coats carrying boxes of papers, followed by a soldier in uniform pushing a large trunk with wheels.

“The president is leaving,” said Moreno Villa. “He says it’s against his will.”

“He’s leaving Madrid? The situation’s that bad?”

“It seems the government doesn’t want to take any risks. But Don Manuel is suspicious and thinks they want him out of the way.”

“They’ve always said he was a fearful man.”

“I don’t think he’s afraid this time. He gives the impression of simply being tired. Sometimes he passes me and doesn’t see me. He pays no attention to what’s said to him. Not because he doesn’t care about the course of the war but because he doesn’t expect anyone to tell him the truth. Do you know his aide, Colonel Hernández Sarabia? A civilized man, fairly well read. He told me the president can barely sleep at night. The gunfire and shouting at the executions in the Casa de Campo keep him awake, just as they kept me awake at the Residence. Hernández Sarabia says that when it’s silent and the wind comes from that direction, you can hear the death throes of those who take a long time to die. In the summer, when the gunfire stopped, the frogs in the lake croaked again.”

At the end of a corridor, outlined against the tall windows of a balcony facing west, I see a motionless figure, enveloped in the gray light of a rainy morning that resembles an old black-and-white photograph. At that distance the first thing Ignacio Abel saw was the gesture of the hand that held a cigarette, while the other was bent behind the man’s body, a fleshy hand against the black cloth of a jacket. The president had walked out of his office, where he spent hours writing, to stretch his legs and smoke a cigarette while looking through the large windows toward the horizon of oak groves and the Sierra de Guadarrama, invisible now under the clouds, his manner the same as on another occasion, not long ago, when he looked into the crowd that filled the Plaza de Oriente to cheer him, shouting in chorus the syllables of his last name on the day in May when he was elected to the presidency. He’d stood at the marble balustrade, looking out at the sea of heads in the plaza, his expression a cross between remoteness and mourning. He turned his head slowly when he heard Ignacio Abel’s and Moreno Villa’s footsteps.

“Let’s greet the president.”

“Let’s not, Moreno. I don’t want to bother him.”

“He’ll ask me who you are and will be annoyed and think I brought you in behind his back and am scheming.”

President Azaña exhaled smoke, his bulbous face swelling slightly.

“Don Manuel,” said Moreno, “I’m sure you remember Ignacio Abel.”

“I once drove you in my car to inspect the construction at University City,” Abel said. “And another time I was with you at the Ritz, at the dinner for the opening of the Philosophy Building.”

“With Negrín, wasn’t it? The two of you wanted to convince me that razing those magnificent pine groves at Moncloa had been worth it.”

Azaña’s eyes were a light, watery gray. He extended his right hand and held it almost inert while Ignacio Abel shook it. It was a soft hand, colder than Moreno Villa’s. Seen up close, the president looked older than he did just a few months earlier, and somewhat unkempt, with dandruff and white hairs on the wide lapels of a funereal jacket that had the shine of wear. An air of lethargy and extreme exhaustion slackened his features, made his skin colorless.

“How’s your University City coming along? Have you completed the building we inaugurated with so much fanfare more than three years ago?”

“For the moment everything has been suspended, I’m afraid, Don Manuel.”

“An elegant way to say it. Negrín and the architect López Otero and the minister of education insisted on telling me that by October of this year they’d take me to the dedication of the completed site. But that was before the construction strike and all this began.”

“Dr. Negrín has always been an optimist.”

“I imagine by now he’s found reasons not to be. Though I couldn’t say. He doesn’t come to see me anymore. He’s probably busy, being a minister…”

“Señor Abel leaves tomorrow for the United States. He came to say goodbye to me and pay his respects to you.”

Azaña looked at Abel from behind his glasses, on his face an expression of subtle sarcasm.

“On another of those official missions we sponsor so our most distinguished intellectuals can hurry out of Spain without losing their self-respect? The minute they cross the border and feel safe, they say bad things about the Republic.”

“Señor Abel has been commissioned to design a building at a university in the United States,” said Moreno Villa, as if improvising an excuse. “A great library.”

Azaña looked at the two of them but no longer seemed to see them, or didn’t trust them. The nail on his left index finger was yellow with nicotine; the tip of his right had an ink stain.

“If you think I can do something when I’m there, let me know.”

“No one can do anything. We’re our own worst enemies. Have a good trip.”

The president bent his head slightly and without shaking hands returned to his office, to the notebook where he wrote in a tiny, regular script, in the light of a lamp even during the day, an artificial glow he liked to be enveloped in as if it were a refuge.

About the rest of that day he remembers almost nothing, only the unreality in which everything seemed to sink in the face of his imminent journey, as if all the actions, once completed, were done for the last time. He’d have liked not to recall the solitude of the apartment on that final night, the hours approaching his departure, the electric light weakened by the damage of a recent bombing raid, the unpleasant taste of the cognac he drank to calm himself as he lay down on the bed, fully dressed, his suitcase on the floor, the documents in a folder on the night table. He took off his shoes, turned out the light, closed his eyes to rest for a few minutes. He woke with the anguished feeling that it was late and the truck would have left by the time he reached the station. But the clock on the night table told him that only a few minutes had passed. In the darkness a voice repeated his name from the end of the hall, on the other side of the closed door, secured on the inside with a double lock and bolt. A hand knocked gently to call him without raising an alarm, someone repeated his name, the mouth at the space between the door and the frame, breathing, pronouncing the name as if the sound would be enough to overcome the resistance of the wood, the thickness and weight of oak, the firmness of the steel lock and bolts. “Ignacio,” it said, “Ignacio, open the door.” This time violent steps on the staircase didn’t wake him, or the car coming to a stop on the sidewalk in the silence of four in the morning, or the glare of headlights shining through the shutters into the dark bedroom. It was a slow, familiar voice, which he identified as soon as the daze of sleep vanished. He sat on the edge of the bed. Had he dreamed the voice? He sat a while longer, alert now, his back straight, his hands on his knees, wanting to believe he wouldn’t hear that voice calling him again, the knocking on the door wouldn’t be repeated. If the silence hadn’t been so profound, Víctor’s voice wouldn’t have penetrated so clearly the closed doors and the space of empty rooms. He stood, trying to make no noise; he didn’t turn on the lamp for fear the click of the switch would betray him. He moved cautiously, one step and then another, pausing after each movement, advancing in the darkness from one room to another, catching glimpses of the white sheets covering the furniture. Before he reached the door, he froze when he heard the voice again, identified it without the slightest uncertainty, recognizing its impatience, the anger mixed with fear, the hoarseness of someone who hasn’t spoken aloud for a long time, perhaps hasn’t had water to drink, has a fever, is wounded. “Ignacio, for the sake of all you love best, open the door, I know you’re there, I hear you breathing.” But it was impossible for Víctor to detect his presence if Ignacio himself was barely aware of the silent breath in his nostrils, so still he could feel his heartbeat in his temples and in his chest. “Ignacio, they’re after me, I have no place to hide, let me in. I promise you I’ll leave before daybreak. No one saw me come in. I won’t compromise you, Ignacio, no one will see me leave, for the sake of all you love best.” Ignacio stretched out his arm until he touched the door. With extreme care he lifted the thin metal cover of the peephole. He peered out quickly, as if he might be observed from the outside. But he saw nothing. The landing was in darkness. The bulb in the ceiling light had blown out a while ago and the porter hadn’t changed it. He heard the brush of Víctor’s body against the door, adhering to it, his agitated breathing, the click of his tongue in a mouth with no saliva. His palm hit the door repeatedly but cautiously. The panting was interrupted by the voice repeating his name: “Ignacio, Ignacio, for God’s sake, open the door, if you don’t hide me they’ll kill me, I know you’re there, I hear you, even though you don’t want me to, I saw you come in and I know you haven’t left.” Now he closed his fist and hit the door with his knuckles, and with his other hand he turned the bronze doorknob as if trying out the possibility that it would not resist, that the door would open, allowing him to step into the safety of the other side. He stopped knocking for a while. Though Ignacio heard no footsteps, it was hard to tell whether he’d left. On the other side of the peephole, nothing but concave darkness. But he was still there, only he’d leaned his back against the door and slid down to the floor. And if he never left, if he passed out, if he stayed much longer, by the time Ignacio had to leave, it would be too late for the truck to Valencia. Perhaps he’d been wounded and was bleeding to death. Perhaps he’d spent many nights without sleep, fleeing from one hiding place to another, and was asleep at the door. But the voice sounded again, closer, hoarser, his lips against the edge of the door. “Ignacio, I swear I haven’t killed anybody, I haven’t harmed any of your people. Ignacio, open the door. What will your children think when they find out you let them kill me?” He could almost feel Víctor’s breath on his face, that other body glued to his, the sour smell of his fear. He listened for footsteps but didn’t hear any. The seconds ticked on his watch. A door suddenly opened then closed, keys and bolts turning after the rumble of the heavy wood door. Motionless, cold on his face, on the soles of his feet, Ignacio knew the voice spoke to him from farther away, perhaps only a few centimeters but already beyond this world. “Damn you, Ignacio. Damn you. You never had a heart. Not to be a red or to be a man. I know you’re there, Ignacio.”