In the Night of Time

33

HE LEFT THE FACULTY CLUB after lunch, relieved to be alone after spending the morning subjected to Stevens’s chatter, his inexhaustible enthusiasm, his condescending smile as if addressing an invalid. Stevens had said he’d come for him at nine that morning, and at five to nine he heard the car stopping in front of the house, and the horn. Ignacio Abel had been waiting for some time, reading, sitting beside the window, observing the treetops that disappeared into the distance, listening to the birds in the forest and those that flew by in high triangular formations across the clear sky, making loud cawing noises that raised distant echoes. He woke early, aware of having slept deeply, with no dreams of voices saying his name or phones ringing. He stayed in bed for a while, barely moving, content in the warm softness of the quilt and pillow, the clean sheets, their whiteness growing purer as the first light of day entered the room, a little before the sun appeared above the conical treetops. He saw his raincoat tossed at the foot of the bed, his shoes and socks on the floor, his trousers and shirt hanging over the chair, like the traces of someone else’s presence; weariness and the smell of cheap food and hotel rooms still clung to them. He took a long bath in hot water, submerged in the tub that had the spacious proportions of everything else in the house, and when he closed his eyes and lowered his head beneath the water, holding his breath, he felt himself dissolving in the weightlessness of rest, protected, absolved, his skin soothed by the touch of soap and sponge, his sex revived like an underwater plant or animal, bringing with no effort of memory the recollection of Judith’s body — no, not the recollection, the physical sensation, intense and fleeting, like having her close in a dream and losing her as he woke, as the water in the tub began to cool, his phantom lover accompanying him to places he’d never been with her. When he wiped the steam from the mirror he saw the exhausted face of his journey, the restless eyes of someone who hasn’t yet reached his destination. He soaped his face slowly, making a good deal of lather with the badger-hair brush, part of the pigskin case stamped with his initials, a gift from Adela on his last saint’s day, when they were still planning the entire family’s move to America. The razor slid gently over his skin, softened by the heat of the bath. He shaved as meticulously as in his bathroom in Madrid, though without the rush that tended to rule him then, the rush to get to the office right away or to meet Judith Biely early in the morning, the most gratifying secret encounter because it occurred at the busiest time of day. Today he was early and had time for everything. In the guesthouse time was as plentiful as space. The loose skin on his neck made shaving more difficult. The line of his jaw was no longer as clear as it had been. Age, which he’d rarely paid attention to — out of distraction, pride, the flattery of Judith’s love — had begun to slacken muscles that once were firm, softening his face, almost erasing in his dewlap the shape of his chin. But carefully shaven and combed, a straight part in the center of his hair, his sideburns cut cleanly at a suitable length, he looked younger and more respectable, not a dubious refugee or an upright pauper, one of those who read newspaper want ads at cafeteria counters or on park benches, or those fugitives from Hitler who’d begun to arrive in Madrid from Germany a few years earlier. How grateful Professor Rossman would have been for a room like this, a slow bath and clean clothes, a tranquility that didn’t alleviate uncertainty but left it suspended. Now he could finally put on the clothes he’d set aside with great care for this day: the white shirt, the cuffs and collar not worn, the spare suit he’d hung in the closet before going to sleep, the vest, the tie pin, the cuff links. He polished his shoes as well as he could, but there was no way to hide the cracks or worn soles, and one of the laces had to be tied gently because it was frayed and could break at any moment. I learn most from observing how everyday things wear out, the engineer Torroja had told him in Madrid: how they deteriorate, how time and use give them their true form and then destroy them. The soles of these shoes, cut and sewn by hand and now unrecognizable, the laces rubbing against the eyelets, subject to wear that in Torroja’s scientific mind was similar to that of the ropes on a ship or the steel cables of a bridge. He could toss his dirty clothes into a wicker basket in the bathroom, which Stevens had pointed out to him; the smell of them embarrassed him, signs of the lack of hygiene to which he’d gradually surrendered in recent months. On the closet door was a full-length mirror where he examined himself, brushed his suit and hat and tried to give the brim the proper tilt. Too formal, perhaps, but maybe that was the effect of not having really dressed with care ever since being well dressed in Madrid had become strange and dangerous. He saw in the mirror not so much the person he was at this moment but the memory of the man he’d been a year ago, in this same suit, on the day in early October when he dressed to give his talk at the Student Residence, the first image of him that Judith Biely would remember, if she still remembered him.

Too formal: the suit cut by a modern tailor in Madrid is, here at Burton College, suddenly old-fashioned, almost antiquated, compared with the students’ casual clothing and the flannels and checked jackets of the professors, who project an air of rural English gentry in harmony with the vague medieval mimesis of the architecture. That’s why it’s so easy to distinguish Ignacio Abel when he leaves the Faculty Club and walks along a path in the central quadrangle of the campus. He’s more formal and moves more slowly than the rest, more leisurely with his hands in his pockets and his excessive Spanish pallor, enjoying the early afternoon sun without his raincoat or a suitcase in hand, passing groups of young men and women carrying books and briefcases and hurrying to their classes or the library, where there is no more room for books, a pseudo-Gothic building that will be abandoned as soon as the new library is built, the one that exists only as an imaginative conjecture sketched in a notebook he carries in his pocket. He observes supple bodies and healthy faces that seem never to have been brushed by the shadow of fear or distorted by cruelty or anger. The girls in light dresses on the warm October morning, in flat shoes and white socks, and the boys in brightly colored sweaters, almost all of them bareheaded, mixing in a seemingly effortless camaraderie. The quality of their teeth allows their laughter: he recalls Negrín’s judgment when he observed people’s faces in Madrid with the eyes of a physician and saw the sad signs of malnutrition and lack of hygiene. Pasteurized milk and cod liver oil, abundant calcium for rotten teeth, would be the remedies for Spain’s backwardness! He has time; they won’t be picking him up for the dinner the president of the college is giving in his honor until six. Hours seemed to sprout within hours: he finished dressing this morning and still had time to eat breakfast, write a letter, and examine the solitude of the guesthouse. In the hallways hung oil portraits of men in colonial dress or nineteenth-century frock coats, landscapes of the banks of the Hudson with blue mountains in the background and hills covered by autumnal forests, and watercolor renderings of projected college buildings. On one crudely executed, vividly detailed picture, a label with the inscription Burton College, 1823 floated above a view of a large, fortified, Gothic-looking tower rising from a clearing, as meticulous as a medieval illuminated manuscript. Like an intruder or a phantom he walked down the oak steps of the staircase that led to the foyer. In the light of day everything was different from what he’d seen the evening before. He crossed a large library with half-empty shelves, a grand piano in the center, folding chairs propped against one wall. He crossed a sitting room that overlooked a garden and had a hearth where a fire of fragrant wood crackled, and deep leather armchairs beside which hung newspapers on frames. It seemed as if someone diligent and invisible had been waiting for him to wake. He heard the sounds of plates and flatware. At the end of a long dining room table was a breakfast service. A stout black woman said a jovial good morning and asked a series of questions he understood only gradually, deciphering the obvious sounds with some delay. He agreed to everything: he wanted coffee, he wanted sugar and milk, he wanted orange juice, butter and marmalade, rye bread. The woman was at once majestic and accommodating: she said things to him that were indecipherable when he thought he was on the point of understanding them, and she observed with indulgent patience as he attempted to say something and suddenly a trivial word would escape him. She watched him eat, respectful and affable, served him more milk and more coffee and slices of dark, porous bread, and indicated with gestures that he should spread on more butter and try each of the pots of marmalade arranged on the table. She quickly gathered the breakfast things and told him with exaggerated hand movements not to worry about anything, she’d come back later to clean the house. Her expression was sad as she watched him eat and said something about the Great War and the lack of food then, and that her husband (or her son) had fought in Europe and come back sickened by poison gas. There was something wholesome in everything around him, in the construction of the house and the thickness of the slices of bread, the rich density of the milk and the heavy china of the cup, a kind of robust cordiality that was also in the woman’s presence and the size of her hands, with their pink nails and white palms.

When he was alone again the dimensions and silence of the house seemed to multiply. A murky touch of unreality was in the presence of things, the sharpness of his perceptions. Comforted by breakfast, he again crossed spaces that seemed conceived for him alone to inhabit, distant from his life and yet as hospitable as if he’d lived in them a long time and had returned now, this morning, to the rooms flooded with sun, the fire lit, the day’s newspapers on the racks next to the leather armchairs. He opened one with the fear he had felt so often, the simultaneous longing for and revulsion at finding news about Spain. It was a two-week-old New York Times, and he was about to put it back but anxiety drew him to its wide pages and tiny print. And there it was, on an inside page, the eternal curse of the bullfight’s language and cruelty: DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON — AND AT DAWN. He saw those words and knew they referred to Spain. They had to be there, “death” and “the afternoon,” as if it were an article about a bullfight and not a war, and the word “sun,” the white-hot brilliance exaggerating the colors of the national fiesta to the delight of tourists: DEATH UNDER THE SPANISH SUN — MURDER STALKS BEHIND THE FIGHTING LINES — BOTH SIDES RUTHLESS IN SPAIN. For them, both sides are the same in their exoticism and taste for blood: Elimination of Enemies by Execution Is the Rule. Who could have read the paper two weeks earlier, leaning back in the chair with broad, worn arms, the leather as noble as the logs burning in the fireplace or the marble mantel, who could have been interested in the news about executions in those arid landscapes punished by the sun while on the other side of the large window that faced the garden, a gentle, early autumn breeze would have been stirring the leaves and bringing the smell of soil and rain. What was a country at war like for someone reading the paper after breakfast: remote, cruel, doomed to misfortune, prompting perhaps a virtuous sympathy that costs nothing and strengthens the comfortable feeling of being safe, protected by distance and the civilization that permits you to take as a given the pleasures of the morning, bathing after a night of sleep, the abundance of breakfast in a spacious room illuminated by the clean light of day, the smell of coffee and of ink on the newspaper, of toasted bread and fresh butter gently melting on it. That’s how he’d read the news about Abyssinia not many months before, looked at the photographs in Ahora and Mundo Gráfico of defenseless Ethiopians with their spears and tribal robes, insolent Italian legionnaires in their epic colonial uniforms copied from bad adventure movies, their Fiat planes armed with machine guns and incendiary bombs. Now the Abyssinians are us: we are the victims of merciless invaders and those entrusted with the most rudimentary part of slaughter.

Murder Stalks Behind Fighting Lines. He put down the paper without having read the whole article and left the guesthouse, inhaling the fresh air that held the dew’s moisture and a smell of earth and fallen leaves, resin and the sap of the tall cedars or firs that edged the clearing, their tips moving gently in the breeze. A woodpecker’s rapping resonated, as powerful and clear as the knocking on a door or the echo of steps beneath a dome, the entire trunk vibrating, the wood strong and fresh. The ground covered with leaves gave gently under his feet, and the dew on the grass wet his shoes and the bottoms of his trousers. On one side the road disappeared into the woods. On the other, the side of the house struck by the sun, lay a rolling landscape of pastures and cultivated fields interrupted by white fences and farmhouses and tall barns painted vivid colors. He would have liked to follow either of those roads. But he was afraid he might get lost or be late, and he went back to the guesthouse, not only as a precaution but also because he saw himself as incongruous in his European city suit and shoes. From the outside, measuring it against the scale of the trees, he admired the shape of the building, the suggestion of deep roots in the way it rested in the clearing, solid and closed in to resist the cold of winters, a structure beautifully integrated into the countryside, yet singular, the balustrade of the terrace above the columns of the portico, the large windows facing all the cardinal points, the woods, the cultivated fields, the river, and beyond, the elevated line of blue mountains. He went back to his room to polish his shoes again and the bed was already made, the fold of the sheet straight, the pillows plumped up. Sitting by the window, his back erect in the solid chair, his hand resting on the desk, on the folder of drawings and watercolors he’d brought from Madrid, he imagined letters to his children and Judith Biely, calculated the time in Spain, listened to the sound of Stevens’s car slowly approaching.

Stevens was flushed, recently showered, resplendent, as if not only the gold frame and lenses of his glasses had been polished but also his light blue eyes, his nails, his teeth, his shoes of creaking leather that transported him from the car at almost the same speed as he’d been driving. He smelled of cologne and mint toothpaste. When Ignacio Abel sat down beside him, Stevens started the car and looked at his watch, impatient to make use of his time, to complete each of the tasks he’d planned for the morning, jumping arbitrarily from English to a Spanish so heavily accented it was unintelligible, gesturing to show him the points of interest around the campus, more at ease this morning, more sure of himself because he wasn’t subjected to the intimidating presence of Philip Van Doren. They stopped at buildings that had an air between Gothic and rural and contained overheated offices. The secretaries or typists smiled when they shook Ignacio Abel’s hand and paid close attention to hear his foreign name clearly, demonstrating by their high-pitched voices the enthusiasm they felt at meeting him, especially when Stevens listed his accomplishments, then showing a pained compassion when Stevens mentioned the war in Spain and the difficulties Professor Abel had to overcome to leave the country. He had to fill out forms, show documents, answer questions, nod even if he was confused, didn’t understand what he’d been asked, couldn’t find his passport or the document he’d put in a pocket moments before in another office. He had to get in the car again and continue the rest of the tour: meadows, patches of forest, rural paths, churches, classroom buildings, dormitories, athletic fields, more overheated offices and introductions, then again the fresh air with the smell of forest and lawn, the car backing up abruptly and Stevens looking at his watch, the labyrinth of goings and comings shrinking, reassuringly, to one scenario, the irregular quadrangle around which the principal buildings of the campus were organized: another University City, not half in the planning stage and left hanging and abandoned before it had come into existence, not erected on a tabula rasa of desert-like fields and eradicated pine groves, but having grown gradually, first as pioneer settlements in clearings in those forests long ago, then taking on a form both haphazard and organic, with visual similarities to British universities: Gothic towers, expanses of lawn, ivy-covered walls, and always — it seemed to Ignacio Abel, a newly arrived guest to this peculiar slowness of time, a convalescent from Spanish cataclysms — a serenity that corresponded to the immemorial cycles of the world, the passing of the seasons and the course of the river close by, gradual building rather than fits of rapture as sudden as disasters. At one of their stops, Stevens opened a door, preceded him up a spiral staircase, crossed a corridor with a low ceiling and stone ribs, opened a door that led to a small, comfortable room, and said, to Abel’s surprise, that this would be his office. In another room he was introduced to a group that welcomed him eagerly, it is so exciting to finally have you here as part of our faculty, and a moment later Stevens unceremoniously tugged on his sleeve and took him downstairs to a windowless room that was a photography studio. In the few minutes before the next undertaking, he ought to have his picture taken for his college identity card. The photographer had him sit on a stool before a black curtain and worked hard to get him into the correct position, making jokes Ignacio Abel didn’t understand but that provoked in the photographer hilarity not shared with Stevens, who kept glancing at his watch because soon they were to have lunch with a group of professors at the Faculty Club, and before that, a visit to the site of the future library. It was Mr. Van Doren’s special wish, he’d told him that very morning, that Professor Abel see the spot and make his preliminary notes on the terrain. That photograph must be somewhere in the archives of Burton College, the file card with his name typed in, faded because of the passage of time, the corners worn or folded, the attempt at a smile by an overly serious man who that morning looked older than his age, his face baffled, worried, unfamiliar, his lips curving rigidly at the corners.

Now he doesn’t have to smile, or nod, or make an effort to understand what’s said to him, or follow Stevens’s hurried steps. Stevens begged his pardon for leaving him, he had to teach a class. Would Ignacio Abel manage on his own for the next few hours? Would he like a student to accompany him or drive him back to the guesthouse? But nothing appeals to Ignacio Abel more than being alone with his thoughts. He’s discovered that in reality everything is close: the car made distances seem longer. He knows now that it takes less than fifteen minutes to walk to the guesthouse that seemed so deep in the woods. This morning the tree branches hit the windows of Stevens’s car when it ascended the narrow road that led to the clearing of the first excavation for the future library, abandoned years earlier. Such a long trip to reach this destination: a hole in the ground half covered by weeds, fallen trunks, and dry leaves over several autumns, the edges raked by the teeth of steam shovels. After imagining it so often, Ignacio Abel hadn’t been able to look fully at what he at last had before his eyes. To really see something, he’s always needed to be alone. Only Judith’s presence expanded his capacity for seeing, opened his eyes to things he wouldn’t have noticed without her. Madrid was a different city because he discovered it through her eyes. Stevens was beside him, and even when he was quiet, his mere presence distracted and irritated him. The excavation extended from the top of the hill to the middle of a slope. To one side were the campus buildings at the end of the road, grouped against the landscape extending to the horizon, and at the same time spaced out, with a haphazard appearance that when closely observed revealed an axis, an organizing principle, around the quadrangle Stevens called the Commons. To the west, beyond the red and ocher and yellow undulation of the treetops, the river was a broad metal plate attenuated by blue mist where the sun reverberated, the white sails of boats suspended in it like butterflies. Stevens pointed out mountains or buildings in the distance, mentioned their names, cited dates of construction and the exact dimensions of the plot on which the library would be built. “And the river view,” he said, like a guide longing to persuade a group of tourists of the value of the place he’s sharing with them. He looked at his watch, impatient for the visit to fit into the amount of time allotted it, unable to be still and silent. It was twelve-fifteen, he said; at twelve-thirty they had a table reserved at the Faculty Club.

Now he follows the road up the slope, in the enormous shade of the trees, maples and oaks, which he thinks he recognizes, and others whose names he doesn’t know in Spanish or in English, and he thinks of the labels on the trees in the Botanical Garden in Madrid, and of Judith Biely’s surprise when she recognized some, like friends you meet unexpectedly in a foreign country, their sumptuous autumn colors standing out even more in a city of earth tones and dusty greens. But here they’re much taller in this dark soil, fed by the rain, covered by fallen leaves, then snow during the long winters, infused by slim, secret threads of water when the thaw begins. He thinks with nostalgia, with melancholy, of the young trees planted along the avenues in University City, so fragile in Madrid’s extreme temperatures, always threatened by the cold that comes down from the snow-covered peaks of the Guadarrama or by the heat of summer, their trunks almost as slender as those on the wire trees he sometimes put on maquettes, cutting foliage for them out of green-colored cardboard. Some mornings, when he drove to the office to check on the progress of construction, he found the trees broken, knocked down by vandals, the rancor against trees of people from dry, barren lands who fear the roots will rob them of already scarce water. But now he knows that the mere weakness of something encourages its destruction, and perhaps for that reason he’s even more astonished that these trees have grown for several centuries, older than the buildings that can be glimpsed through the groves, perhaps more enduring than the future library, with branches so long they intersect over his head like the ribs of a vault that barely filters the sun’s rays and sheds, at the least breath of wind, a cloud of leaves; branches that no one prunes, at least not with the rage he’s seen so often in the axes wielded against the trees in Madrid. But I didn’t care either, when construction of University City began, that the trees of Moncloa would be cut down, the pines with long trunks and rounded tops that succumbed to axes and power saws, roots like heads of hair torn out by steam shovels, streams buried with dirt then rerouted. We leveled everything to start as if on a blank page, on the flattened scars of what had existed before. Walking up the road between trees that gleam with flaming reds and yellows when the sun shines on them, Ignacio Abel remembers Manuel Azaña’s face, not on the recent day when he said goodbye to him, but on an afternoon no more than four years ago. A cold, cloudy afternoon in November, the Sierra submerged in a gray-blue fog of rain. Azaña was prime minister then and had come almost on the spur of the moment to view the construction, probably urged to do so by Negrín, who brought him in his own car. Ignacio Abel waited for them with the director of University City, the architect López Otero, who’d been a friend of Alfonso XIII and didn’t much like the Republic, not to mention the prime minister. “Don’t leave this afternoon, Abel,” Negrín had said, “we have an important official visit.” But the visitors, whom they received at the temporary construction management office, arrived late in a small yellow car that pulled up with a screech of brakes. Negrín got out first on the driver’s side and walked around to open the other door, holding it like a chauffeur, hat in hand, as the prime minister emerged from the car, awkwardly and slowly, his normally colorless face red with the effort, encased in an ostentatious overcoat, so heavy he couldn’t detach himself without help from the low seat. Supporting himself on Negrín’s strong hand, finally on his feet, Azaña ran his fingers through his thin, disheveled hair before putting on his hat, recovering his ministerial dignity, extending his hand — indifferent and fleshy, slightly damp — for them to shake. The group walked for a while among the skeletons of buildings, observed at a distance by some straggling laborers. While López Otero and Negrín acted as guides, moving their arms to conjure completed installations that would rise one day in that immense space still bare of recognizable forms, Ignacio Abel observed Azaña’s expression, a mixture of boredom and affront, his watery eyes following the procedure without much interest, then fading, or meeting his, perhaps seeking assurance that nothing was expected of him. Azaña stopped, looked around, and the others stopped too, close to the foundation of what would be the Philosophy Building. “What did you do with all the pine groves that grew here? Half of Spain is desert. Why did you have to build your University City on the spot where there were woods?” López Otero cleared his throat and swallowed. “Your Excellency will remember that it was His Majesty Don Alfonso XIII who ceded at no charge the property that belonged to the crown.” Ignacio Abel noticed the tension in Negrín, the vibration in the clenched jaw. Beneath the eyelids that partially veiled his eyes, perhaps Azaña assessed the unseemliness of López Otero’s words, the possible lack of respect. Why “His Majesty” and not “Alfonso XIII” without the ceremonious “Don,” or simply “the king,” or “the former king”? “We’ll have a campus like those at American universities, Don Manuel. People will come to stroll here as they strolled in the Moncloa pine groves. There’ll be better groves.” Azaña had a way of staring as he listened and at the same time remaining distant, as if he saw his interlocutor only vaguely. “I repeat my observation, Don Juan, and believe me, I’m as determined as you to complete University City. The fact that it began as a whim of Alfonso XIII—‘His Majesty,’ as Señor López Otero calls him — doesn’t detract from its merit. But why cut down the best trees in Madrid to plant new ones? It may be egotism on my part. No matter how quickly they grow, I won’t be here to see them.”

How difficult the first step in the conception of what doesn’t exist yet: the line of a sketch that might contain in germ the final work, an angle that will engender the complete drawing, not obeying any external purpose but guided by an impulse toward organic growth. Where there’s nothing, there has to be something. From a blank page the first form of a library must emerge. From a hole dug into the side of a hill and quickly covered by vegetation that replaces what was gutted or cut down, walls will rise, staircases, balustrades, windows. The form sketched in the notebook will be glimpsed through the groves of trees and may be seen from sailboats or barges with blunt prows and rusted hulls that pass along the river. Ignacio Abel has the notebook open on his knees and a pencil in his hand but hasn’t drawn anything yet. He is seated on the partially hollow trunk of a tree that fell perhaps many years ago, its roots in the air, the surface burrowed by insects that in some areas have reduced the wood to soft powder. He hears cracking noises, the sounds of animals he can’t see, the flapping of birds over his head that stir brief eddies of fallen leaves. This area of the woods hasn’t been cleared out in a long time. Fragments of trunks, packed-down dry branches, and sheets of bark mix together on the ground under a carpet of many autumns’ leaves, the oldest the color of the earth and in part blended with it, crumbled by insects juxtaposing their shapes and colors like disordered pieces in a mosaic, with a variety of ribs and symmetries he would have liked to decipher by drawing them in the notebook, or better still, picking them up and pressing them between its pages. From the river comes the muffled noise of a train, the sound of a foghorn he heard in his dreams last night. The fallen trunks, covered with lichen, remind him of the ruins in the Roman Forum: grass and wild mustard, broken columns, the marble on the capitals so eroded and porous it has become pure debris and turned a calcareous white like animal bones. He understands that the sketches he’s made are useless. The building can’t have existed in his imagination with that diamond-like perfection he’s admired so much when he saw Mies van der Rohe’s pavilion in Barcelona — admired with envy of something he knew he wouldn’t be capable of achieving, feeling mediocre, limited, provincial. How would a prism of steel and glass look, surging before the eyes of someone coming up the road between the trees, or seen from other buildings on the campus when night fell, shining in the distance like an illuminated lighthouse. The imminence of work generates in him both excitement and dejection: sloth, almost panic, the vertigo of a void he isn’t sure he’ll know how to confront. A squirrel with a rounded body and lustrous fur approaches with a succession of brief movements and picks up an acorn, examines it, suspended between its front paws. He doesn’t move, so as not to frighten it, and the squirrel turns its back, brushing one of his shoes with a tail as soft and full as a shaving brush, moves away in silent leaps, divested of weight, making a sound in the leaves as faint as the damp breeze that makes them tremble. The sky has clouded over, the air is cooler, and the leaves are falling in more frequent gusts of wind. A round drop dampens the middle of the page in the notebook where he hasn’t drawn anything. He raises his head and Philip Van Doren looks at him, smiling, his arms crossed, leaning against a tree.

“I see you managed to free yourself from Stevens. But you should be careful in these woods, Ignacio. As a city dweller, you don’t know its dangers.”

“Are there wild animals?”

“Something worse, that I don’t believe you have in Spain. Poison ivy.”

“Hiedra venenosa?”

“Right now you’re sitting close to it. You can’t imagine the itching. But it’s fantastic to see you wearing your suit from Madrid in our American wilderness. I wish Judith could see you.”

They look at each other across the clearing, not saying anything now that the name’s been spoken. A light rain has begun to fall. From an athletic field comes a burst of scattered applause and the sharp repeated sound of a whistle. Ignacio Abel has closed the notebook and put it in a jacket pocket, expectant for no reason, alarmed because he’s heard Judith’s name, the evidence of her objective existence.

“You want to ask me whether I know anything about Judith, but you can’t bring yourself to. Like that night in Madrid, don’t you remember? The city was burning and all you could think of was finding her. You’re reserved, something I approve of. Given my Lutheran upbringing, so am I. But I don’t like your distrust of me. I’ve given you proof of my loyalty. It wasn’t easy getting you out of Spain and arranging for you to come to America, to Burton College.”

“I regret not having thanked you.”

“I’m not asking you to.”

Now the sky was a darker gray that accentuated the shadows deep in the forest. Ignacio Abel swallowed.

“Were you her lover when you lived in Paris?”

“Splendid Spanish jealousy.” Van Doren looked at him, smiling fondly, almost indulgently. “I imagined you took it for granted I don’t find women attractive.”

“Probably only Judith attracted you.”

“Don’t say it in the past tense. I find Judith very attractive. More than any other woman and more than a lot of men. I was drawn to her from the moment I saw her, on the deck of the ship that had just taken off from America. In that regard you and I are alike. We both saw in her a desire to experience everything, to enjoy everything, without irony, like a model student, which is what she should have been. You need a good deal of nobility to feel real enthusiasm. Judith’s doctorate was Europe. Everything in Europe — architecture, museums, paintings. I don’t think anyone has spent more time or been happier at the Louvre, or the Jeu de Paume, or the Uffizi, or the Prado. She felt the same rapture sitting in a café and writing a card or a letter and putting Paris in the return address. The letters she wrote to her mother, do you remember? Pages and pages, telling her everything, like class exercises where she demonstrated how much she’d learned. The Americans who come to Paris settle into a café on Saint-Germain-des-Prés as soon as they can and put on a weary look that says they’ve already seen it all and don’t have to go on playing the tourist. Being a tourist is a humiliating condition. But Judith didn’t have those reservations. She wanted to climb the Eiffel Tower and attend a Gregorian Mass in Notre-Dame and ride at night in a Bateau Mouche along the Seine. She also wanted to go to Shakespeare and Company and spend hours looking at the books she longed to read and standing watch in case James Joyce or Hemingway put in an appearance. Judith is the great American enthusiast. Even more American because her parents are Russian Jews who speak English with a terrible accent. Her mother, as you know, sacrificed everything so she could make this trip, and Judith had to show her that she was taking advantage of every penny. One invests hard-earned money and expects a profit. To squeeze every penny of it dry. She’d be offended if she heard me say it, but it’s a very Jewish idea of return on your money. Very Jewish and very American. Money doesn’t provoke in us the modesty you have in Europe, especially in Spain. Every cent her mother kept in a tin box, hiding it in the kitchen, was a small act of prowess when you think what the past few years have been like in my country for people of the class Judith belongs to. Penny by penny, the sound of copper in the tin box, the worn dollar bills. But your life wasn’t very different when you were young, if I’m not mistaken. I have a gift for imagining what other people are living or have lived through. That’s my only talent. Just as you have a gift for seeing what doesn’t exist yet.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“Lovers, Judith and I? If it were true, you wouldn’t need to ask. Judith would have told you. American honesty. Full disclosure, we say. Just to set the record straight. In Paris what I liked most about her was not so much Judith herself as the enthusiasm she radiated, the light that was in her. She’d go into a café filled with smoke on one of those horrible black rainy afternoons, and it seemed she was followed by the spotlight in a theater. But I fell more in love in Madrid. Not with Judith but with your love for her, what you were seeing when you looked at her and what she saw in you. I wanted to be you when I saw her looking at you. I remember it all so well. I saw how you came into my apartment in Madrid and almost blushed when you discovered Judith among my guests that afternoon. A coup de foudre if I’ve ever seen one. You probably assume it’s inevitable that I like opera, with all its falseness that’s truer the more exaggerated and unbelievable it is. You were Tristan the moment he takes the cup away from his lips and looks at Isolde. Operas should be performed in street clothes and ordinary places, Tristan and Isolde or Pelléas and Mélisande meeting in a café after walking through a revolving door. Drinking an icy martini instead of a medieval cup of poison. But I’ll understand if you’ve grown to hate Wagner. Perhaps Debussy is more tolerable. I was in Bayreuth two years ago and saw Tristan. When everybody was seated, waiting for the curtain to rise, there was a rush of uniforms and evening clothes because Chancellor Hitler had just entered the box of honor, but I didn’t come to see him. It doesn’t matter. I lack the ability to tell something in a straight line. You don’t discipline yourself as a narrator if your entire life is spent surrounded by people who have to listen to you. You and Judith didn’t know it yet, but the moment you saw each other the two of you were lost. I was dying of envy. The magnetic current between you passed through me, crossed the air in my house. I wanted to be each of you. Few things that have happened to me have shaken me as much. Nothing, in fact. The world seems to me a very expensive theatrical production mounted exclusively for me. All alone in a box in an enormous empty theater, like Ludwig of Bavaria attending the premiere of an opera by Wagner. He couldn’t permit himself that, and ended up bankrupt. But I can. And what I like is not to watch a performance but real life. Actors are vain and venal, and if you approach them, you see the unpleasant makeup that melts on their faces under the heat of the lights and their sweat. I do no harm by observing real lives. I don’t stoop to paying for others to pretend to love me. I prefer to see other people’s genuine love, or any passion that ennobles them. Judith in Paris, looking at Manet’s Olympia up close, or in Madrid when she went to one of those tiresome flamenco dance performances, or when she once showed me that empty museum you’d taken her to, the Academy of San Fernando, happy to show me something that was almost a secret and not those rooms in the Prado filled with foreigners. Or you a moment ago, so deep in your notebook you didn’t hear me arrive. I’ve never learned how to do anything. My passion is observing the passions of others. If they consent, or if they don’t know, who gets hurt?”

“You spied on us in the house on the beach. You offered it so you could follow us.”

“Don’t give me so little credit, Ignacio. I wasn’t drooling in the next room, watching through a crack. It was enough for me to imagine you on those days. To see you from a certain distance. A telescope is the most useful of inventions.”

It has started to rain. Tiny drops gleam on Van Doren’s shaved head and he continues to stare at Ignacio Abel, his gestures passing from irony to the appearance of affection or complicity or sadness.

“I hope you’re not offended. Judith didn’t ask me to, but I did everything I could to bring you here. Not that it was difficult. Your name carries weight, even this deep in the woods. I needed to find a solution, if only a provisional one, a breather for you both. I knew your work and that’s why I invited you, but then it was no more than a project, like so many others that go nowhere. As for Judith, she couldn’t go on postponing her return to America. Her mother’s savings weren’t going to last forever. I had to bring both of you here.”

“To continue to spy on us?”

“So you’d have a part of the life you both deserved. So that thanks to your talent, Burton College will have a beautiful, modern library, and something I can do will objectively benefit the order of the world.”

Van Doren turns when he hears a car coming up the muddy road. Stevens puts his head out the window, looking distressed, blows the horn with triumphant vehemence, as if he were sounding trumpets. He’d been looking for them for he doesn’t know how long, he says, getting out of the car with an umbrella; he’s been everywhere, afraid something had happened, that Professor Abel was lost. First he escorts Van Doren, opens the back door for him, comes back to Ignacio Abel, reminds him that in less than an hour they must be at the college president’s house, and under no circumstances can they be late. The rain lashes the windshield when Stevens turns the car to go back to the campus, fat drops drumming on the leather top. Ignacio Abel looks at Van Doren — who’s wiping his head and face with a handkerchief and looking out at the woods — as if he didn’t remember his presence. But he has to decide, in spite of his cowardice, his fear of not knowing and his fear of knowing.

“Do you know where Judith is now?”

“Finally you ask me. You’re a proud man.”

“I’ll ask it as a favor if you like.”

“I heard her mother died of cancer this summer. Then I was told she found a job as an assistant professor at Wellesley College. Not far from here, a trip of a few hours. I wrote to tell her you were coming, but she hasn’t answered my letter. She’s like you. Too full of pride.”