In the Night of Time

35

SHE STANDS BEFORE HIM, lit by the lamp he holds. At the open door, the damp breeze from the woods blows in his face, his eyes blinded by the headlights of a car parked in front of the house, its motor running. He looks at her and doesn’t say anything, neither one says anything, while the burbling of the motor continues and the windshield wipers click. The light strikes her face at an angle, her eyes, her damp hair now stylishly cut, shorter and not combed back but with a part and a lock of hair on one side that she brushes off her face with a gesture familiar and at the same time foreign, sudden, different. They look at each other without moving, his left hand holding the lamp, his right still on the doorknob. He looks at the car, its motor running and headlights on, in which he instantly fears there’s someone, a man, who’s come with her and at any moment will reclaim her by blowing the horn. “I thought nobody was in, I didn’t see a light,” she says in Spanish. Her voice, darker than he remembered it, has a more pronounced American accent. Pensé que no había nadie: so much time longing for this voice, the lips that form the words, not knowing how to invoke it, believing at times he’d heard it saying his name in the commotion of a street, a station, whispering close to his ear moments before waking. He takes a step toward her, or only takes his hand off the doorknob, as Judith draws back in an almost invisible gesture. He’s afraid if he moves or says anything, he’ll lose her; he’s afraid she’ll turn on her heels and get back in the car or vanish into the woods just as she’s emerged from them. Judith starts to move as if to turn but remains still, looking at him, a corner of her mouth curving into the beginning of a smile. In the faint, close light of the lamp her face is less familiar because the short hair exaggerates her features: her large mouth, the triangle of her cheekbones and chin, the line of her jaw. Ignacio Abel doesn’t move the hand that would have liked to caress her, but his eyes transmit to his fingers the sensation of touching her skin. Judith points at the car and says, now in English, “I’d better turn it off.”

What surprised her most about Ignacio Abel was his dark suit, so European and old-fashioned, and how thin he was, his eyes sunk into their sockets. An attempt to bridge the distance between them causes an imperceptible retreat. Not a step back but a subtle gesture, little more than the dilation of a pupil, the bat of an eyelid. How strange to have once been so intimate with this middle-aged stranger whom she might now pass on any street without turning her head. They don’t know how to act, what to say. Nothing dissolves as swiftly as physical intimacy. The gulf between them at the café in Madrid where they met for the last time is now in the doorway of this house, the slash of a knife in the space between their two bodies.

“I’d better turn it off”: Ignacio Abel deciphered the words only once he sees them demonstrated by her actions. As Judith turns her back and walks to the car, he recognizes the self-confidence, the movement of her shoulders, her hands. He registers her face and presence as slowly as the words. The pride in her shoulders, the slight inclination of her head, her hips hugged by trousers. Her haircut modifies her face as it did when he’d see her wearing it pulled back, and she was more herself and at the same time another Judith, whom he desired even more because she was unexpected. She returns from the car, and as she climbs the stone steps, she reenters the circle of light from the lamp. Now she almost smiles at him when she says something he translates after hearing it: “Aren’t you going to ask me in?” He looks at her as if gradually recognizing the features he’d touched in the dark, when he breathed in the smell of her skin and hair with his eyes closed. She smells of herself and her old cologne and fatigue and the tension of many hours’ traveling. She smells of the lipstick she put on a few minutes ago. Ignacio Abel looks at her face, at the details memory did not preserve and that were not reflected in the partial lie of photographs. Under her blouse and the wide-bottom trousers that narrow to encircle her waist, her beautiful tired body, so close to him, inaccessible now to his hands and eyes. The opened button on her blouse, the décolletage in shadow, the quiver of her breathing, red lips, gleaming in the light, the fatigued face she observed in the rearview mirror before getting out of the car, still motionless behind the wheel. A feeling of pity for him has taken her by surprise, lowered her guard. A troubling pity that would offend him if he ever suspected it, and a beginning of tenderness that doesn’t resemble what she felt in the old days, the inexplicable past of only a few months ago. Then, Ignacio Abel looked no more than forty. When he opened the door, and even more so when she came back from the car, she saw a man much older, awkward, as if frightened, staring at her as he rigidly held up the oil lamp. The dark pinstriped suit, the double-breasted jacket with the wide lapels — wasn’t it the one he wore the day of his talk at the Residence, and again at Van Doren’s house? — now looks secondhand. The loosened tie encircles a neck that is almost an old man’s. She sees his awkwardness, his alarm, not the yearning for closeness he had then, the physical affirmation of male desire, the instinctive arrogance. He looks shorter, but it’s because now, unlike then, his shoulders are slightly rounded and his posture diminished and no doubt exaggerated by how loose his suit is. She wants to tell him not to hunch over, to straighten his shoulders. She could extend her hand and touch his face, noting the rough stubble of beard that was there by the time they’d meet in the late afternoon. She recovers the sensation of burying her fingertips in his thick hair, now grayer and lacking the sheen it had when he wore it combed back. “Me dejarás entrar?” she says, changing to Spanish, and the open smile on her face is a truce, almost a welcome to the side of the world where they find themselves now. “I’m dying to use the bathroom.”

He hears her footsteps upstairs. He pays attention: he hears her urinate, then the water in the pipes, the sink faucet. Lying in bed, he’d listen to her wash in the wretched bathroom in Madame Mathilde’s house, then turn his face to see her appear naked in the doorway, smelling of the soap and cologne she’d brought in her toiletries bag. She closed the door and turned on the faucet before sitting down to urinate: she told him it embarrassed her to have him hear her. Sexual excitement returns like a surprise, retrieved by memory and by Judith’s presence on the floor above in this large house where only a few minutes ago no human closeness seemed possible, only the creaking and chafing of the wood floors, the gurgle of steam in the heating pipes. She told him she was cold and hungry. While he listens to her in the bathroom, he has stirred up the fire in the library and looked for something to eat in the pantry and refrigerator. The flames fill the library with a red glow where shadows oscillate like plants under water. The windowpanes are mirrors where Ignacio Abel moves accompanied by his shadow, looking for things with a male lack of confidence: sliced salami, rye bread, an apple, the tablecloth the maid spread out for his breakfast, a fork and a knife, a glass of water. He finds a beer in the refrigerator and nervously looks through drawers for an opener. Doing something has calmed him, given him a sense of reality as he waits for Judith to come down from the second floor and listens to her footsteps: the water in the sink is turned off and the door to the bathroom is closed; she walks slowly along the hall, her way lit by a small candle; she descends the stairs. She sees him standing by the fire and would like to shake him, wake him up, if only to see the man she had left with so great an effort of courage and pride, the man who told her lies or half-truths she chose to believe, closing her eyes as deliberately as she let herself be driven by him in his car, her self-respect suspended, just like so many undertakings in her life, her body abandoned in the seat as his right hand searched for hers or caressed her between her thighs while music played on the radio. Her anger with him gave her a confidence she misses now. If there’s no trace of danger in him, the responsibility and remorse for her own past actions, for what almost happened, are hers alone: the woman with wide hips and gray in her hair who tried to drown, the humiliation of discovering a deception that she, Judith, was complicit in, for she had acceded to a lie no love could shroud. When she saw them together that time at the Residence, she thought Ignacio Abel was younger than Adela. Now in the library she sees him in the light of the fire and thinks that by some strange shortcut in time he’s reached his wife’s age and belongs to the same world, the bureaucratic Catholic middle class of Madrid she’d seen leaving churches on Sunday mornings, going to tearooms on the Carrera de San Jerónimo, the married couples so serious, men and women in dark clothing, the women wearing veils. She wants to shake him, to feel the danger again and be capable of rejecting it, or to spare herself the pity she feels for him, the self-pity she sees in him, the humiliation of having lost her and not being desired by her; the precarious thread from which hung the fiction of his masculinity, further undermined by the fear and suffering of war. It’s also the war she sees in his eyes, she thinks, in the weakening of his shoulders and arms, the loose skin under his chin.

“I look at you and I can’t believe you’re here.”

“I’ll leave soon.”

“Then why did you come?”

“It was on my way. A detour.”

“You’ll stay the night. There are plenty of rooms.”

“And what would your colleagues think if they saw me leave here in the morning? You don’t know what these places are like. Wellesley’s the same way. They know everything and gossip. Like a novel by Galdós, but with professors as protagonists.”

“Then you shouldn’t have come.”

“I’ll go as soon as I’ve eaten something and rested a bit. I can be in New York in two hours.”

“Don’t you have to teach class tomorrow?”

“I’ve left that job.”

“But I thought they just hired you.”

“Philip tells you everything.”

“Is it true you’re working with Salinas?”

“Worked. I know you don’t like him, but he does remind me of you.”

“Will his wife and children be joining him soon?”

“He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know whether his contract will be renewed for next year. He’s discouraged when he doesn’t get letters or news from Spain, and even more discouraged when he does. It’s easy in these places to become isolated.”

“I just arrived yesterday and already it seems I’ve been here a long time.”

“Poor Professor Salinas tells me he misses Madrid a great deal. Whenever he can he escapes to New York for the weekend. But he says the hardest thing for him is getting used to eating without wine.”

“Does he have any hope of going back to Spain?”

“What about you? You left not long ago. You’re better informed than he is.”

“I read the papers here and listen to the radio and everybody seems convinced that Franco’s about to enter Madrid.”

“He hasn’t entered yet. With a little luck he never will.”

“And what do you know? How can you be so sure?”

“Because I don’t believe the American newspapers or radio networks are telling the truth. They belong to the big corporations, and their owners have supported Franco from day one, just like the Catholic Church.”

“This doesn’t sound like you. More like the talk at a meeting the other day in New York.”

“Were you there? Last Saturday? In Union Square?”

“I looked at the faces of all the women, hoping to see yours.”

“The last thing I’d have expected would’ve been to run into you.”

“I’ve been hoping to run into you since the day you walked out of the café.”

“It was moving, all those people filling the square. Some climbed the trees and the statue of George Washington. I saw the Republican flag and heard the ‘Himno de Riego’ and ‘The Internationale’ and couldn’t stop crying.”

“Good intentions, but no one’s helping. They look at us as if we had the plague, as if we were lepers. In a hotel in Paris they didn’t want to give me a room when they saw my Spanish passport. They probably thought I’d fill the bed with lice. Civilized opinion seems to be that it’s a good idea to leave us alone so we can keep killing one another until we grow tired of it. They look at us like those tourists who go to bullfights, ready to be excited or horrified, to enjoy being horrified in order to feel more civilized than us. And the fact is, they’re not altogether wrong, given the spectacle we’re offering them.”

“It isn’t right for you to say that. The military and the Falangists rebelled against the Republic. They haven’t been defeated yet only because they have the help of Mussolini and Hitler.”

“You’re talking again as if you were at a meeting.”

“Aren’t I speaking the truth?”

“The truth is so complicated nobody wants to hear it.”

“If you know it, explain it to me.”

“I probably left so I wouldn’t see it. Truth seen up close is an ugly thing.”

“I don’t think you can live with your eyes closed.”

“And why not? Most people do and it’s not hard. I’m not talking about people outside Spain, who after all may not know about the war, or read about it in the paper and care less than they do about a soccer game. Even in Madrid I know many people who’ve managed not to know what’s happening or at least act as if they didn’t. They lead perfectly normal lives, believe it or not. They adopt the new style and the new vocabulary. But I imagine I’d get used to it if I had stayed, at least if I was lucky and they didn’t kill me.”

“Why would they kill you?”

“For any reason. On a whim, or by mistake, or for no reason, by chance. Killing an unarmed, peaceful person is the easiest thing in the world. You don’t know how easy — like putting out a candle. Unless the executioner is clumsy or gets nervous or doesn’t know how to handle a rifle. Then it can seem endless. Like bullfights when the butchers miss with the sword or dagger.”

“The newspapers here publish terrible lies about what’s going on in Madrid.”

“Some of those lies are true. The worst ones.”

“The others commit worse crimes. They started it. They’re to blame.”

“Reason and justice are on your side.”

“I don’t like such abstractions. You didn’t use them before.”

“You did. That afternoon we talked for hours in the bar at the Hotel Florida. I was struck by how seriously you took it. It annoyed you when Philip Van Doren spoke contemptuously about the Republic and praised the Soviet Union and Germany in his snobbish way. You said you were Republican because you believed in reason and justice. I liked your passion.”

“I didn’t remember our talking about those things.”

“Don’t you think the same way anymore?”

“What I think is that killing doesn’t bring about reason and justice.”

“If someone attacks you, you have the right to defend yourself.”

“And do you have the right to kill innocents?”

“I was afraid something might’ve happened to you.”

“Then you didn’t think everything they were saying was a lie.”

“And you came close?”

“You could’ve written and asked.”

“I’m asking now.”

“I was saved by accident, at the last moment. You’ll understand if I don’t really feel like going back.”

They have to learn to speak to each other again, to adjust the tone of their voices, to smooth away the strangeness, to move close to each other gradually, naturally, slowly, the way one learns to walk again after recovering from an accident, when you discover that it took no time for your legs to lose their muscle tone and the habit of taking steps. Evasive eyes no longer know how to hold a stare; with greater difficulty mouths form words in another language that were once habitual. Perhaps it’s not that they have become strangers in so short a time, but that they see each other for the first time in a light not clouded by desire. It’s not the changes that have occurred during their separation but the reality not seen when it was there every day. They felt their way at first, asking neutral questions. I see you’ve had a haircut; this morning, before I left on the trip, do you like it? Of course I do; you don’t like it; I have to get used to it; you always wore it longer and curlier; I didn’t have time to go to a hairdresser. Neither one has said the other’s name yet. Silence follows each question; they almost count the seconds it takes for words to arrive again, as if they didn’t depend on the will of either one. A nuance, a barely suggested tone of intimacy miscarries. An isolated phrase sounds as if it had been memorized for a performance, an overly literal exercise in good manners in a language class. “May I use the bathroom?” she said when she finally came in, when he closed the door and they found themselves alone in the house. While she ate, he observed her in silence as he sat on the other side of the table in the library, in the somewhat incongruous formality of his dark suit and tie, relieved she wasn’t looking at him, a healthy young woman unhurriedly satisfying her hunger after having driven for several hours, drinking from the bottle of beer, more American than he remembered now that he sees her in her own country. She’s put salami between two slices of bread and eats it in vigorous mouthfuls. His desire for her is more of a pain than pure sexual appetite. It’s the pain in his joints, the pit of his stomach. Since he hasn’t set out napkins, Judith wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. What he finds unfamiliar and distant in her must have to do with the presence of another man. Jealousy is a physical snakebite, a toxic substance circulating in his blood. In photographs, in memories, Judith’s beauty had a blurred quality, as if he were looking at her through a faint gauze filter. The word “beautiful” can’t exactly be applied to the woman Ignacio Abel sees before him, with her short hair and simple shirt, her ringless hands that hold the sandwich of rye bread and salami and open the bottle of beer with such ease. There’s something more carnal, raw, excessive in the peremptoriness of her features: her nose, large mouth, pronounced chin, the hard shape of bone beneath the skin. He likes her even more, and more than ever. He especially likes what’s taken him by surprise because he didn’t see it before and sees it now. Lack of hope and the certainty he’d lost her allow him to enjoy a painful objectivity. Her existence is enough: the unexpected gift of having her near.

“Don’t look at me that way.”

“How am I looking at you?”

“As if I were a ghost.”

“I’m looking at you because I never tire of looking at you. Because I’ve missed you so much I can’t believe you’re here.”

“I’m not sure you see me when you look at me. I’ve never been sure. You would stare at me but seem to be elsewhere, lost in your world, probably thinking about your work, or wondering whether your son or daughter had a fever, or your wife, or what lie you’d tell when you got home, or the remorse you felt deceiving her. You’d look at me and then look away, though only for a second. We were kissing in that room at Madame Mathilde’s, and I saw you in the mirror across from the bed looking at the clock on the night table. Just a glance, but I noticed it. I believe in the man you are, not the one I might have dreamed you were. And when I read your letters I felt like running out and getting into bed with you, felt as dizzy as when we had those cold beers in cafés. But then, reading them again, I felt the same doubt as when I just saw you looking at me. I wasn’t sure it was me you were writing to. The letters were so vague. You talked about what you felt for me and our love as if we were living in an abstract world in which there was nothing else and no one else but us. You filled two pages telling me about the house you wanted to build for us, and I asked myself where, when. Promise me you won’t get angry with me for what I’m saying.”

“I promise.”

“You’ll get angry. Sometimes I thought you wrote to me reluctantly, because you felt obliged to, because I was asking you to. You made fun of those wordy articles intellectuals published in El Sol, but there was something in your letters that reminded me of them. You told me what you felt about me but didn’t answer the question I’d asked. I thought of an expression you taught me: dar largas. You were putting me off so you’d never have to address our real lives, yours and mine. And the truth was that though we spoke so much and wrote to each other so much we never spoke about anything specific. Only about the two of us, floating in space, floating in time. Never about the future, and after a while almost never about the past. You said you were in love with me but became distracted whenever I brought up my life. And if I mentioned my ex-husband, you changed the subject.”

“It makes me jealous to think you’ve been with other men.”

“You’d be less jealous if you’d let me tell you that my husband and those others never mattered to me half as much as you.”

“There were more men.”

“Of course there were. Did you think I was in a convent waiting for you to appear?”

“I couldn’t stand the thought of you with someone else. I can’t now, either.”

“I had to stand not the thought but the reality that after being with me you could dissimulate with no difficulty and get into bed with your wife.”

“We hadn’t touched each other for a long time.”

“But you were with her, not me. In the same room and the same bed. While I went back alone to my room in the pensión and couldn’t sleep, and if I turned on the light I couldn’t read, and I sat in front of my typewriter and couldn’t write, not even a letter. And if I wrote to my mother, I couldn’t tell her that her sacrifice had allowed a married Spaniard to have a younger American lover.”

“Van Doren told me your mother died.”

“How strange for you to ask about her.”

“I always wanted to hear about your family.”

“But you became distracted the minute I started talking about them. You didn’t realize it, and you don’t remember, but you were an impatient man. You were always in a hurry for one reason or another. You were nervous. You were anxious. You’d throw yourself on me in bed sometimes, and it seemed you’d forgotten you were with me. You’d open your eyes after you came and look at me as if you just awoke.”

“Is that all you remember?”

“No. At other times you could be very sweet. Other men don’t even make the effort.”

“I was crazy about you.”

“Or about someone you imagined. I reread your letters and thought they could just as easily have been written to another woman. I was flattered at the time to be the one who inspired those words in you, but sometimes I didn’t believe them. You’d look at me and I didn’t know if it was me you were looking at.”

“Who else would it be?”

“A foreigner, an American. Like those women in the movies and the advertisements you said you’d always liked. You enjoyed looking at me. It always seemed you could have done without the talking. You were more expressive in letters.”

“Am I looking at you now the way I did then?”

“Now your eyes have changed. When you opened the door I didn’t recognize you. Now I’m recognizing you again, slowly, but not completely. I don’t see you sneaking a glance at your watch.”

“Why are you going to New York?”

“The Spanish man, asking his questions.”

“Are you going to see your lover?”

“Don’t talk to me that way.”

“You used to say you couldn’t imagine yourself going to bed with another man.”

“If I were to remind you of all the things you said to me.”

“I wasn’t the one who disappeared. I wasn’t the one who promised to keep an appointment and then didn’t show up.”

“Do you really want to talk about that now? I didn’t disappear. I left you a letter explaining how I felt, what I thought. Why I couldn’t see you again. I didn’t hide anything from you. I didn’t tell you any lies.”

“You left the letter knowing I was waiting for you in the room.”

“That doesn’t matter now.”

“You could have stayed with me at least that afternoon. You knew I was waiting for you. You must have spoken softly so I wouldn’t hear you. I’m sure you gave Madame Mathilde a good tip.”

“If I’d gone into the room, I probably wouldn’t have had the strength to leave.”

“If I’d seen you that afternoon, I’d have left everything to go with you.”

“As in that poem you couldn’t take seriously? Don’t tell me things that aren’t true. That was what offended me about you. That you told me lies. That you said yes to something when both of us knew it was no. There’s no reason to lie anymore. We’re alone in this house and I’ll be leaving soon.”

“Did you leave Madrid that same night? Were you at Van Doren’s house?”

“I was frightened. They stopped me at every corner to ask for my papers and I didn’t have my passport with me, why would I? I don’t know how I managed to get on a streetcar, on the running board, hanging on. I wanted to leave and I wanted to find you so you could protect me. See what happened to my decision to leave you and my yen for adventure? I reached the pensión and tried to call Phil or the embassy but the phones weren’t working, or sometimes they did and other times they didn’t. I called your house several times but you never answered.”

“I was looking all over Madrid for you.”

“It was better for me you didn’t find me.”

“Would you really have stayed with me?”

“You’re yourself again. You want me to flatter you and say yes.”

“Now you don’t want to tell me why you’re going to New York.”

“I’m leaving on a trip.”

“You’re going to meet another man.”

“Is that the only thing you can imagine in my life? Aren’t you curious to know anything else about me?”

“And your job at the college?”

“I left it.”

“To go where?”

“To Spain.”

She answered so quickly it surprised her to hear the words she didn’t intend to say, hasn’t said to anyone yet. The immediate silence has another quality, of resonance, expectation, vigilance, while their eyes remain fixed, locked, each detecting the slightest movements in the other’s face, both aware of the silence and the sounds behind it, the crackle of the fire in the hearth, the first sporadic drops of a light rain that will last all night, their breathing, each waiting for a sign the other will speak. They’ve been lowering their voices as they remained motionless, Judith sitting upright now that she’s said what perhaps she shouldn’t have said, Ignacio Abel serious, one hand resting on the other on the edge of the table, the bony hands that now seem as stripped of sensuality as his diminished, rigid body, his general mood of dignified capitulation. A passenger on the train they hear passing now will see in the distance, through the successive shadows of the forest, a wide lit window but won’t be able to distinguish the two silhouettes. Someone approaching in the light rain would see two motionless figures on either side of a large table, leaning slightly toward each other, as if about to tell or hear a secret. He’d enter the house and advance silently along the dark hall, and though he came close to the open door of the library, through which come the light from the fire and a current of warm air, he’d hear nothing, perhaps indistinct voices, interrupted by silences, then superimposed, isolated words in Spanish or English, the secret of their two lives, protected by the walls of the house, the isolation of the forest, the darkness of the night, the intimacy in which there’s room only for two lovers and where they’ve returned without knowing it yet, though they don’t touch, and when they look into each other’s eyes they sense a guarded secrecy not even the most shameless confession could break. They circle each other with looks and words, laying siege, testing the boundaries of their silence. Between the sound of lips separating, the first word is the emptiness of expectation. The next steps of your life, your entire future, will depend on what is said or left unsaid in an instant. Judith has taken a deep breath and closed her eyes for a moment, as if to give herself courage, to store up the air she will need if she wants her words to sound as clear and confident as they do in her mind.

“I should’ve guessed.”

“Don’t try to talk me out of it. Don’t. Any reason you can give me for not going I’ve already thought of myself and heard many times. I’m not going to change my mind. As soon as you start telling me what I already know you’re going to say, I’ll get up and go back the way I came. You have to live according to your principles. I can’t ease my conscience by occasionally attending an event in favor of the Spanish Republic or going out to the street with a money box to collect donations. I don’t want to think one thing and do another. I don’t want to read the paper or listen to the radio or see a newsreel and die of rage seeing what the Fascists are doing in Spain, and then go on living as if nothing were happening. It’s that simple.”

“And what will you do? Madrid’s about to fall.”

“Why are you so sure? So you’ll feel less remorse because you left? The Soviet Union’s begun to send aid. Just this morning I heard on the radio that the French are going to open the border to let armaments through. There are things the newspapers don’t publish. There are thousands and thousands of volunteers traveling to Spain right now.”

“And what will they do when they arrive? You don’t know what it’s like. My country is nothing but an insane asylum, a slaughterhouse. We don’t have an army, or discipline. And almost no government.”

“I never heard you use the first person plural when talking politics.”

“I didn’t realize I was doing it. I must’ve got into the habit when I left Spain.”

“Not everything is lost.”

“You don’t know what war is like.”

“Stop telling me the things I don’t know. I’m going so I’ll find out.”

“Do you plan to join the militias?”

“Don’t talk to me in that tone.”

“What tone?”

“As if I understood nothing. As if I were acting on a whim. I know very well what I’m going to do.”

“Nobody knows. In a war nobody understands anything. The ones who seem to understand are the biggest charlatans of all, or the most demented, or the most dangerous. I’ve seen war. Nobody told me about it. I saw it in Morocco when I was young and now I’ve seen it again in Madrid, and it’s the same thing, nothing to do with two armies and a battle with advances and retreats and then a bugle blows and everything’s over and you collect the dead. In a war nobody knows what’s going on. The professional military pretend they know, but it’s not true. At best the only thing they’ve learned is to dissimulate or push others in front of them. A bomb explodes and you’re dead or bleeding to death and holding your insides in your hands, or you’re left blind or missing your legs or half your face. And you don’t even have to go to the front. You go to a café or a movie theater on the Gran Vía and when you leave a mortar shell or an incendiary bomb falls and if you’re lucky you don’t know you’re going to die. Or someone denounces you because he doesn’t like you, or because he thinks he saw you coming out of Mass once or reading the ABC, and they take you in a car to the Casa de Campo and the next morning the kids have fun with your body, putting a lit cigar in your mouth, calling you an idiot. That’s war. Or revolution, if you think that word’s more appropriate. Everything else they’re telling you is a lie. All those parades that look so good in films and illustrated magazines, the posters, the slogans — They Shall Not Pass. Brave, honorable men climb into an old truck to go to the front and the other side mows them down with machine guns, and they don’t even have time to aim the rifles that in most cases they haven’t learned to handle properly, or they have very little ammunition, or it’s not the right kind. In half an hour they can be dead or lose both arms or both legs. The ones who seem the fiercest and most revolutionary stay behind the lines and use their rifles and clenched fists to get free service in bars or whorehouses. The Fascists have machine guns mounted on their planes and amuse themselves by firing on the lines of campesinos and militiamen fleeing toward Madrid. The militiamen waste ammunition firing at the planes because, even if they know how to aim, they don’t know their guns aren’t powerful enough to reach the planes. The pilot is annoyed, and instead of continuing on his way he turns around and machine-guns them in an open field as if they were ants. The only ones who end up on the frontlines, where death is almost certain, can’t help it because they were dragged there or because they believed the propaganda and got drunk on banners and anthems. Every man who can, escapes, except the innocent and the deluded, and they’re the first to die or be mutilated or disfigured. Not on the first day but in the first minute. Some don’t even carry weapons. They think that going to war means lining up and keeping time while you follow a band playing ‘The Internationale’ or ‘To the Barricades.’ They see the enemy coming and can’t run because their legs are trembling and they shit themselves in fear. It’s not a figure of speech. Extreme fear causes diarrhea. The other side hunts them down with no difficulty. Just like hunting rabbits. Do you know what they enjoy? They get bored when it’s so easy to kill, and they look for entertainment. You can imagine what they do to women. With men they often cut off noses and ears and then slit their throats. They cut off their testicles and stuff them in their mouths. They put a head with the ears and nose cut off on a broomstick and carry it in a parade. But our men do that too sometimes. Don’t look at me like that. It’s not enemy propaganda. I saw the decapitated head of General López Ochoa marched around Madrid. The leftist parties and the unions hated him because he led the troops in Asturias in ’34. On July 18 he was in the military hospital at Carabanchel because he’d had an operation, and some brave man got the idea of killing him right there. They dragged the body through the streets and cut off his head, ears, and testicles. It was like a procession, a carnival, with a swarm of children running behind. You’re going to tell me the other side is worse. I don’t doubt that at all. I’ve also seen what they do. They rebelled, and it’s their fault the slaughter began. They deserve to lose, but we’ve done so many savage and stupid things, we don’t deserve to win.”

“And you’re above it all?”

“I’ve gone as far as I’ve been pushed. They could have killed me in Madrid — the other side surely would have killed me if I’d stayed with my children that Sunday in the Sierra. I’m not a brave man. I’m not a passionate man. I’ve almost never had strong emotions, except for you, or sometimes for my work, imagining it. I’m not a revolutionary. I don’t believe history has a direction or that you can build heaven on earth. And even if you could, if the price is an endless bloodbath and tyranny, I don’t think it’s worth paying. But if I’m wrong, and revolution and slaughter are necessary to bring about justice, I prefer to step aside if I have the chance, at least to save my life. It’s the only one I have. I’m not a man of action like my friend Dr. Negrín. I learned it these past few months, spending so much time alone. I hardly spoke to anyone and often couldn’t sleep and thought about what I really like, what I need. I need to do something well that is also useful and lasting and solid. People obsessed by political passions frighten me, or seem ridiculous, like those who turn red shouting at a soccer game, or the racetrack, or a bullfight. Now they also disgust me. I think there are many more despicable people than I ever imagined. The old intoxicate the young to take revenge on their youth and send them to slaughter. Many people who seem normal become savages when they see and smell blood. They see a neighbor shot who until yesterday had greeted them every morning, and if they can, they steal his wallet or his shoes. My poor friend Professor Rossman was a saint. He never hurt anyone. He’d get on a streetcar and take off his hat if there was a woman in front of him. He made his bed every morning at the pensión to save the maid work. He’d been eminent in Germany, and in Spain he earned a poor living selling pens in cafés, but I never heard him complain about the country or lose his patience. You met him. Well, they killed him like an animal because some cretin must have thought he was a spy because he spoke with a German accent or carried a briefcase filled with newspaper clippings and maps of the front. Before they killed him, they beat his face to a pulp. And I didn’t see his daughter again, either. They didn’t know anything about her at the pensión or the office where she worked. As if the earth had swallowed her. I couldn’t help either one of them. I probably didn’t have any luck or was afraid to insist too much and put myself in danger. That’s the truth. My wife’s brother came one night to ask me to hide him because they were looking for him. I didn’t open the door. If I’d let him in, I probably couldn’t have left, or I’d have had to postpone the trip again, or they’d have locked me up for helping him. Maybe they killed him that same night. He was a Falangist and a fool, but nobody deserves to go around hiding in doorways like an animal. And that’s not all. He really loved my children, and they loved him, the boy especially. He loved his uncle so much it made me jealous. And if in spite of everything he managed to escape and get to the other side, he’ll be so full of rancor he’ll become a butcher. It’s possible he goes to see my children, and they admire him all the more seeing him turned into a war hero, and he tells them their father betrayed him. I could have told him to stay and denounced him. I would have done my duty, since my brother-in-law was in one of those Falangist groups that shoot militiamen from roofs or drive in a car at top speed machine-gunning people who line up for bread or charcoal. A traitor. A saboteur. But it’s not that I felt compassion for him. I didn’t want my trip ruined because of him.”

He speaks without moving and without taking his eyes off Judith. Words leave his mouth, though he barely separates his lips. He speaks and doesn’t think about what he’s going to say next, the sound of his own voice spurs him on. The fury is in the words, not in him. He maintains a monotonous neutrality, as if testifying at a trial or making a statement, being careful not to speak too quickly for the typist who’s transcribing it. Speaking alleviates and exalts him. It returns shame and lucidity to him in waves, and restores an abused but not abolished shadow of personal integrity. He can’t be the only one who’s fled, who hides behind a submissive courtesy, who before speaking must be certain not to offend or annoy anyone. His hands still rest on the table, one on top of the other, and the muscles in his face don’t move either, though the unequal light from the fire and oil lamp modifies the shadows. But he’s become more confident as he speaks, raising his voice a little or perhaps pronouncing words with more precision and a different kind of energy, just as he hasn’t once lowered his eyes or stopped speaking when Judith looked as if she were about to say something. He’s been silent for so long that even if he wanted to, he couldn’t stop talking. It’s now, stimulated by his own words, that he begins to realize how long his silence has lasted, the huge volume of what he’s kept silent, its monstrous proliferation, silence a habit and a refuge and a way of accommodating to the world, then transformed into the very space around him, the cell and bell jar where he’s lived in recent months. The silence in his apartment on sleepless nights, the silence in his office at University City; looking and keeping silent, looking away, not saying anything, traveling in silence on trains, alone in hotel rooms, in a cabin on the ship that crossed the Atlantic, in New York cafeterias where he sat by the window to look at the street and the signs painted in bright colors. He’s been silent for so long, and now words come easily to him, the images of what he’s seen and what he’d like to describe to Judith with absolute accuracy, though he suspects he won’t succeed. No explanation can convey the experience, the terror, the absurd truth that only someone who’s lived it can understand, though he tries in vain to turn it into words and moves his lips as if gasping for air, not looking away from Judith’s eyes; looking at her now with an openness he didn’t have before, slowly taking pleasure in her reclaimed features, her proximity, the marvel of her existence now that he has no hope, and desire is stunted by her physical reticence, by the inertia of a bitter male capitulation, wounded vanity, and sexual humiliation. But it’s this lack of hope that allows him to see Judith more clearly than ever, his attention for the first time free of the urgency of a desire that in its former fulfillment was always undermined by the fear of evanescence and loss. Now he sees Judith exactly as she is. Her voice reaches him as precisely as the brush of a hand on his eyelids.

“If you know so much, tell me the honorable way to act. Tell me whether you think there’s a just way to behave.”

“I don’t know anything. I don’t know whether I’m as much of a clown as the rest. Each person justifies his shameful behavior the best he can. Only the murdered are without guilt, and you don’t want to be one of them. Professor Rossman, or Lorca.”

“I couldn’t believe it when I read it in the paper. Professor Salinas was distraught. I wanted to think it was a rumor, a false report. Why would they have killed him?”

“For no reason, Judith. He was innocent. Do you think that’s a small crime? Innocents are not wanted anywhere.”

“You finally said my name.”

“You haven’t said mine yet.”

“‘Living in pronouns.’ Do you remember? I didn’t really understand the meaning of that poem. You explained it to me. The lovers can call each other only ‘you’ and ‘I’ so they won’t be found out.”

“Don’t go. Stay with me.”

“I already have the ticket. The ship sails tomorrow from New York. Three hundred of us are going. And many more will go soon. In small groups, to keep a low profile. Some will go to France first, others to England.”

“The borders will be closed.”

“We’ll cross where the smugglers do.”

“This is not a novel, Judith.”

“Don’t talk to me again in that mocking tone.”

“I don’t want you to be killed.”

“I asked you to tell me what can be done, and you haven’t answered.”

“There’s nothing you can or should do. You’re lucky, it’s not your country. Forget about it because you can. Many more people were killed in Abyssinia than in Spain and neither of us lost any sleep over it. And neither did the democracies or the League of Nations. Hitler wants to expel all the Jews from Germany, and he’s put the Social Democrats and Communists in camps, and there hasn’t been a single international protest. Will anyone be shocked to learn that he’s helping Franco? In Russia they die of hunger by the millions and nobody cares, but all the generous lovers of justice are moved by Soviet propaganda. With some exceptions, this whole world is a horrifying place. Don’t they lynch Negroes in the south of your country? How many were killed three or four years ago in Paraguay, in the Chaco War? Hundreds of thousands. You may not have heard of it. Do you really believe that your actions, just or unjust, can make any difference? If you want to ease your conscience, join a committee of solidarity with the Spanish Republic. Ask for money in the street, collect warm clothing. The militiamen need it now in the Sierra. If you send them a sweater or a blanket, you’ll have been more useful than letting yourself be killed. If you collect just one can of condensed milk or a pack of cigarettes for them.”

“I hear you speak and I don’t know you.”

“I’m not here to tell you what you want to hear.”

“I shouldn’t have come. I could have been in New York by now.”

“Go on, then. Maybe by the time you get to Spain the Republic won’t have collapsed yet. They’ll welcome you with placards and bands. They’ll take you on a tour of some peaceful front. In Madrid they’ll give a dinner dance in your honor at the palace of the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals. The meal they’ll serve will be much better and more abundant than the food they give the soldiers at the front — that is, if there are trucks to bring the food, or gasoline for the trucks, maybe there isn’t any, or it’s being used for parades or for taking people to slaughter. Alberti and his gang of poets in nicely pressed blue coveralls will recite yards of verses for you. They’ll take you to a bullfight and a flamenco performance. They’ll take pictures of you and you’ll be in the papers. They’ll present you as further confirmation that all over the world sympathy is growing for the struggle of the Spanish people against fascism. Then they’ll take you to the border and you’ll all go back to your countries with a clear conscience and the joy of having had a dangerous, exotic adventure. You’ll even go back with a tan.”

“I’m leaving. I don’t have to listen to this. I’m ashamed of you.”

She stood up and now looks at him from above, as if challenging him to try to block her way. His two hands are separated, parallel on the table, but that’s the only movement he’s made. He raises his eyes to her, then looks at the fire, then at the spot where Judith had been only a moment before. She’ll leave, and each step she takes will be a definitive parting. He thinks of Moreno Villa this summer, in his room at the Residence: now we’ve learned that in these times a casual departure may be forever. She’ll cross the darkened library, the foyer. He’ll hear the door shut, then wait for the car engine to start. Angry and nervous, Judith won’t begin to drive right away. The sound of the engine will become steady. Sitting still, his eyes on the fire, he’ll hear the sound fading until it’s gone, the red taillights dimming like embers at the end of the road, the tunnel of entwined tree branches. In the silence the patter of the rain will return, the crackle of the fire, a brief burst of logs burning. After a while no sign that Judith has been here, only the plate with her unfinished supper, the half-consumed bottle of beer. He’ll go up to bed, lighting his way with the oil lamp, and search for Judith’s scent on a towel. He’ll look in the mirror to brush his teeth, half his face erased by darkness, his own eyes eluding him. He makes no move to stop her, now that he still has her within reach. Judith speaks, framed by the door she’s just opened and at any moment will cross. She is calm.

“You think you know everything, but you don’t know anything. The volunteers I know don’t go to Spain to be tourists, I can assure you. Many are already there receiving military training to join the Republican army. Many more will arrive from America and half the world. If there were so few differences between the two sides, and it all amounts to nothing more than savagery and senselessness, there wouldn’t be so many intelligent and brave people prepared to risk their lives in Spain. You know I’m not a fanatic. I don’t feel much sympathy for the Communists. But they’re organizing recruitment, and I’ll go to Spain with them and many others who aren’t Communists. If I hadn’t fallen in love with you, I probably wouldn’t have fallen in love with Spain. But by now it’s my other country, and what’s happening there breaks my heart. Just reading the names of the towns in the paper or hearing them pronounced on the radio. When they say ‘Madrid,’ it’s my city because you showed it to me. I lived two years in London and Paris and never stopped feeling like a foreigner. A foreigner who visited extraordinary museums with a guilty conscience because I got bored too soon and wasn’t European. I went to Madrid, and as soon as I took my first walk around the Plaza de Santa Ana, between the shoeshine boy and the grocery, it was as if I were back in New York. I like the Spanish. Me caen bien, as you say. I like the slow, shabby streetcars and the pots of red geraniums on the balconies. I like the Rastro as much as the Prado. But it isn’t the romanticism of an American, though you may think so. It’s political common sense. I was moved by the poor lining up with so much dignity to vote on the day of the last elections. I liked to go through your neighborhood and see people entering and leaving the new modern market you designed, with the flag on the façade. If Hitler and Mussolini help the military win in Spain, what will happen next in the world? I don’t want those people to enter Madrid.”

“And what will you do to prevent it?”

“Anything. Whatever I can. I can drive an ambulance and help in a hospital. I speak French, Yiddish, and a fair amount of Russian, aside from English and Spanish. I can act as an interpreter. Someone will have to help all those people who are arriving to communicate with the Spaniards. You say you’re not brave and not a revolutionary, and neither am I. You say what you like is to do something well, and that’s what I want. I don’t plan to argue politics. Ever since I was married I’ve had a horror of the aggressive arguments about Stalin and Trotsky, kulaks, five-year plans, world revolution, socialism. I want to work for the Spanish Republic. I want to be in Madrid, just as I was this time last year.”

“That Madrid no longer exists.”

“It can’t have disappeared in so short a time.”

“You won’t recognize it.”

“I prefer to find that out for myself.”

“Stay with me. If you go now, I know I’ll never see you again.”

“You didn’t count on seeing me now anyway. Nothing will happen to me in Spain.”

“Even if nothing happens to you, if you go now you won’t come back. Think of how big the world is, how complicated it is for two people to meet. We’ve been lucky twice — there won’t be another time. When you came tonight, it was for a reason.”

“I came to say goodbye.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“It was on my way.”

“That’s not true.”

“I have to go now.”

“Just stay the night. I’m not asking for anything else.”

“I’m not your lover anymore.”

“I’m not asking you to go to bed with me. The only thing I’m asking you is not to leave tonight. You’ll have to sleep somewhere.”

“What do you want from me?”

“I want us to go on talking. I’m here with you and I can’t believe it’s true. So many times I imagined that I’d see you again and that we would talk and talk, without getting tired, without falling silent. I never stopped imagining what I’d say to you when I saw you again, all that I’d tell you. Thinking was talking to you. I don’t know how many letters I wrote to you in my head those three months in Madrid and while I was traveling. Crossing the ocean, when we reached New York. A lot of people were waiting at the gangplank, and I thought I saw your face, heard your voice calling me.”

She’s gone out to the car to fetch her suitcase, which seems too light for the long trip she’s about to take. In her absence Ignacio Abel has remained attentive, afraid to hear the sound of the engine. He’s heard only the rain on the windows, the tin gutters, the slate eaves, the glass roof of an abandoned conservatory behind the house. Judith sits behind the wheel and watches the drops on the windshield, clouding the sight of the porch and the door she left ajar when she went out. She has both hands on the wheel and the nape of her neck rests against the back of the seat. She knows that he’s waiting inside the large, darkened house, perhaps still motionless at the table in the library, the candle almost extinguished, his thin face illuminated by the light of the fire. She knows him too well. She sees his long hands on the table, the prominent knuckles, hands that made no move toward her, no attempt to touch her. She thinks if she stays now, it’s because she doesn’t have the energy to face two more hours on the road, or the idea of arriving very late in New York and having to find a room in a cheap hotel. He’ll think that she’s taking too long, but he won’t move, fatalistic and alert, sitting at the table in the library, reduced inside the jacket whose shoulders are too wide. He does and doesn’t wait for her. The restlessness of another time is now a self-absorption that has a touch of physical neglect. When he saw her move toward the door, he felt a mixture of anguish and acceptance. Then something happens. The foyer and several windows in the house fill with light. Judith returns holding her suitcase, drops of rain wetting her face and hair. She knows he’s heard her steps and the door close. The electric light shines on the waxed wooden floor, but the hall that leads to the library is still in shadow. Judith pushes the door, hearing fragments of music and voices on the radio. Ignacio Abel is in front of the radio, his face lit by a candle. Judith puts down the suitcase and walks toward him. He looks at her and discovers in her eyes something that wasn’t there before, an unexpected gleam, a trace of another time. It frightens him suddenly to desire her so much, to be so hopelessly drawn to her, now that he can’t or isn’t allowed to touch her. She left a few minutes ago and now she’s back, a second chance, as if she’s returned from Madrid and not the distant past when she was his and he was hers.