In the Night of Time

4

AS SOON AS HE leans back in the seat, Ignacio Abel is overcome by uncertainty. Suppose he’s on the wrong train? The train begins to move and that brief moment of calm turns to alarm. I observe the automatic gesture of his right hand, which had rested, open, on his thigh and now contracts to search for his ticket; the hand that so often rummages, investigates, recognizes, driven by fear of losing something, the one that rubs his face, rough with the unwanted beginning of his beard, touches the worn collar of his shirt, finally closes with a slight tremor, holding the discovered document; the hand that has not touched anyone for so long. On the other side of the tracks sits an identical train that remains motionless, and perhaps that is the one he should have taken. In less than a second he is a bundle of nerves again. At the slightest suspicion of a threat, every fiber in his body tightens to the limit of its resistance. Now he can’t find the ticket. He pats his pockets and doesn’t remember that a while ago he put it in his briefcase to be sure it wouldn’t become entangled in his fingers and fall out accidentally when he looked for something else in his trouser pockets, jacket pockets, raincoat pockets — the haunts of tiny, useless objects, breadcrumbs, coins of little value from several countries. He touches the edge of the postcard he didn’t mail. At the bottom of some pocket, the keys to his apartment in Madrid jingle. He feels the telegram, a corner of the envelope that contains the letter from his wife. I know you’d rather not hear what I have to say to you. He finally opens the briefcase and sees the edge of the ticket, his deep sigh of relief coinciding with the discovery that he’s again been the victim of an optical illusion: the train that’s started to move is the one at the next platform, an identical train from which, for a few seconds, a stranger has been looking at him. So he still has time to double-check. A porter has come into the car, dragging a trunk. Ignacio Abel goes up to him and shows him his ticket, attempting to pronounce a sentence that’s been clear in his mind but breaks down into nonsense as he struggles to articulate it. The porter wipes his forehead with a handkerchief as red as his cap and says something that must be simple but Ignacio doesn’t understand it at first. The man’s gesture is as unmistakable as his weary, friendly smile, and after a few seconds, like a clap of thunder after lightning, every word acquires delayed meaning in Ignacio’s mind: You can be damn sure you’re on your way up to old Rhineberg, sir.

The ticket is for this train and no other. He knew it, but anxiety got the best of him: like an intruder, it usurped the movement of his hands, accelerated the beating of his heart, and pressed against his chest, lodging like a parasite inside the empty shell of his previous existence. In his heart, he no longer believes he can ever go back. Who’ll undo what has been done, raise what’s fallen, restore what’s turned to ashes and smoke? Would the human flesh rotting beneath the ground rise up if the trumpets of the resurrection were to sound? Who’ll erase the words, spoken and written, that sought to legitimize the crime and make it seem not only respectable and heroic but necessary? Who’ll open the door no one is knocking on now, pleading for refuge? Sounds travel at a perceptible though infinitesimally slow rate between his ear and the circuits in his brain where words are deciphered. He sits down again, breathing deeply, his face against the window, looking at the subterranean platform, a stab of pain near his heart, trying to calm down, waiting. In his mind two clocks show two different times, like two discordant pulsations he might detect by pressing two different points on his body. It’s four in the afternoon and it’s ten at night. In Madrid it’s been dark for several hours, and only the dim light of a few street lamps, the globes painted blue, can be seen in the deserted streets. Sometimes the headlights of a car driving at top speed emerge from around a corner, the tires screeching against the paving stones, mattresses tied haphazardly to the roof as an absurd protection, acronyms scrawled with a paintbrush on the side panels, a rifle protruding from the window, perhaps the ghostly face of someone whose hands are tied, who knows he is on the way to his death. (They didn’t bother to tie his legs; he was so docile they probably didn’t think it was necessary.) In the house in the Sierra where his children may still be living, they can hear in the darkness the dry thump of the pendulum and the mechanism of a clock that always runs slow. In the Sierra de Guadarrama the nights are cold now and the smell of damp rotting leaves and pine needles rises from the earth. Over the dark city, on the first clear nights of autumn just a few weeks earlier, the sky recovered its forgotten splendor, the powerful radiance of the Milky Way, which revived old fears from his childhood nested in the memories of a Madrid that predated electricity and the endless streams of headlights running down the streets. With the war, darkness returned to the city along with the night terrors of children’s folktales. As a boy, he’d wake up in his tiny room in the porter’s lodging and stare at faint yellow gaslights from the small barred window at the height of the sidewalk. He would listen to the footsteps and the pounding of the metal tip of the night watchman’s pike on the paving stones, his slow, frightening steps like the steps of the bogeyman himself. Many years later, in a darkened Madrid, footsteps and pounding were once again emissaries of panic: the elevator noises in the middle of the night, the heels of boots in the hallway, rifle butts banging on the door, resounding inside one’s chest to the accelerated rhythm of one’s heart, as if two hearts were beating simultaneously. Ignacio, for the sake of all you love best, open the door, they’re going to kill me. Now the train is really moving, but slowly, with powerful majesty and the vigor of its electric locomotive, granting intact the happiness of every journey’s start: perfect absolution for the next two hours when nothing unforeseen can happen. A brief future with no potential surprises on the horizon is a gift he’s learned to appreciate in recent months. He felt the same way, only more so, in the port of Saint-Nazaire when the SS Manhattan pulled away from the pier, the deep howling of the siren in the air, the engine’s vibration rattling the metal beneath his feet and the railing where he rested his hands as if on the metal of a balcony on a high floor. When he looked down at the shrinking figures waving handkerchiefs on the dock, he felt not the simple joy of having escaped, of actually leaving for America after so many delays, so many days in that state of fear and anxiety, but the suspension of the immediate past and the near future because he had before him six or seven days to live in the present without having to confront anything, fear anything, decide anything. That was all he wanted, to stretch out on a hammock on deck, his eyes closed and his mind clear of all thought, as smooth and empty as the ocean’s horizon.

He was a passenger like any other in second class, still relatively well dressed, though carrying only one small suitcase made him somewhat unusual. Was a person traveling so far with so little luggage completely respectable? You may encounter problems at the border no matter how many documents you show, Negrín had warned him on the eve of his departure, with sad sarcasm, his face swollen from exhaustion and lack of sleep, so you’re better off not carrying much luggage in case you have to cross to France over the mountains. You know very well that in our country nothing’s certain anymore. As the ship left the pier, the war’s stigmas were left behind, the pestilence of Europe, at least for the time being, faded from his memory as water dissolves writing and leaves only blurred stains on blank paper. In a way, the war had reached the French border, the cafés and cheap hotels where Spaniards met, like sick people brought together by the shame of a vile infection that when shared perhaps seemed less monstrous. Spaniards fleeing from one side or the other, in transit to who knows where, or appointed more or less officially to dubious missions in Paris, which in some cases allowed them to handle unusual sums of money — to buy weapons, to arrange for newspapers to publish reports favorable to the Republican cause — grouped around a radio trying to decipher news bulletins that mentioned the names of public figures or places in Spain, waiting for the afternoon papers in which the word “Madrid” would appear in a headline, but almost never on the front page. They had stormy arguments, slamming their fists on marble-topped tables and waving their hands through the clouds of cigarette smoke, rejecting the city where they found themselves, as if they were in a café on Calle de Alcalá or the Puerta del Sol and what lay before their eyes didn’t interest them in the least, the prosperous, radiant city without fear where their obsessive war didn’t exist, where they themselves were nothing, foreigners similar to others who talked louder and had darker hair, darker faces, gruffer voices, and the harsh gutturals of a Balkan dialect. On the two nights he had to spend in a Paris hotel, waiting to have his transit visa and ticket to America confirmed, Ignacio Abel did his best not to run into anyone he knew. It was rumored that Bergamín was in Paris on an obscure cultural venture that perhaps disguised a mission to buy weapons or recruit foreign volunteers. But Bergamín was probably in a better hotel. The one where Ignacio Abel stayed, with a profound feeling of distaste, was largely populated by prostitutes and foreigners, the various castoffs of Europe, among whom the Spaniards preserved their noisy national distinction, intensely singular and at the same time resembling the others, those who’d left their countries long before and those who had no country to go back to, the stateless, carrying Nansen passports from the League of Nations, not allowed to stay in France but also not admitted to any other country: German Jews, Romanians, Hungarians, Italian anti-Fascists, Russians languidly resigned to exile or furiously arguing about their increasingly phantasmagorical country, each with his own language and his own particular manner of speaking bad French, all united by the identical air of their foreignness, documents that didn’t guarantee much and bureaucratic decisions always delayed, the hostility of hotel employees and the violent searches by the police. With his passport in order and his American visa, with his ticket for the SS Manhattan, Ignacio Abel had eluded the fate of those wandering souls, whom he would pass in the narrow hallway to the toilet or hear groaning or murmuring in their equally foreign languages on the other side of his room’s thin wall. Professor Rossman could have been one of them if, on his return from Moscow in the spring of 1935, he’d remained with his daughter in Paris instead of trying his luck at the Spanish embassy, where the clerks in charge of residency permits had seemed more benevolent or indifferent or venal than the French. At times during those days in Paris, Ignacio Abel thought he saw Professor Rossman in the distance, his arms around a large black briefcase, or holding the arm of his daughter, who was taller than he, as if he’d continued to have a parallel existence not canceled by the other, the one that took him to Madrid and nomadic penury, gradual loss of dignity, then the morgue. If Professor Rossman had remained in Paris, he’d be living now in one of these hotels, visiting embassies and consular offices, persistent and meek, always smiling and removing his hat when he approached a clerk’s window, waiting for a visa to the United States or Cuba or any country in South America, pretending not to understand when a bureaucrat or shopkeeper called him sale boche, sale métèque behind his back.

Professor Rossman no longer had to wait for anything. He’d been buried with several dozen other corpses and hurriedly covered by lime in a common grave in Madrid, infected without reason or fault by the great medieval plague of Spanish death, spread indiscriminately by the most modern and most primitive means alike, everything from Mauser rifles, machine guns, and incendiary bombs to crude ancestral weapons: pocketknives, harquebuses, hunting shotguns, cattle prods, even animal jawbones if necessary, death that descended with the roar of airplane engines and the neighing of mules, with scapulars and crosses and red flags, with rosary prayers and the shouting of anthems on the radio. In the tucked-away cafés and rundown hotels of Paris, Spanish emissaries from both sides closed deals on weapon purchases that would allow them to finish off their compatriots with greater speed and efficiency. In the midst of this carnival of Spanish death, the pale face of Professor Rossman appeared to Ignacio Abel in dreams and in the light of day, producing in him a shudder of shame, a wave of nausea, like the one he felt the first time he saw a dead body in the middle of the street under the relentless sun of a summer morning. If he overheard a conversation in Spanish at the cheap restaurant where he ate in Paris, he maintained a neutral expression and tried not to look, as if that would save him from contagion. In the Spanish newspapers, the war had been a daily typographic battle: enormous, triumphant, and colossally untrue headlines printed haphazardly on bad paper, on scant sheets, spreading false reports about victorious battles while the enemy continued to approach Madrid. In the Parisian papers, solemn and monotonous as bourgeois buildings, and secured in their burnished wooden holders under the soothing half-light of cafés, the war in Spain was an exotic, frequently minor matter, news of sheer savagery in a distant, primitive region of the world. He recalled the melancholy of his first trips out of the country, the feeling of leaping in time as soon as he crossed the Spanish border. He relived the shame he’d felt as a young man when he saw pictures of bullfights in a French or German newspaper: miserable horses, their bellies gored open, kicking in agony in a quagmire of guts, sand, and blood; bulls vomiting blood, their tongues hanging out and a sword running through the nape of their necks, turned into red pulp by the failed efforts to kill them with a single thrust. Now it was not dead bulls or horses he saw in Parisian newspapers or in newsreels at a movie theater where he longed for Judith Biely; this time it was men, men killing one another, corpses tossed like bundles of rags into ditches, laborers wearing berets and white shirts, their hands raised, herded like cattle by soldiers on horseback, filthy soldiers wearing grotesque uniforms, cruel, arrogant, driven by a senseless enthusiasm, as exotically sinister as bandits in daguerreotypes and lithographs from the last century, so alien to the worthy European public who had witnessed from a distance the massacre of Abyssinians holding shields and spears and who for months and with perfect impunity had been gunned down and bombed from the air by Mussolini’s Italian expeditionary forces. For a time the Abyssinians appeared in newspapers, in illustrated magazines, in newsreels, but once they’d played their transitory part as cannon fodder, as extras in the great masquerade of international scandal, they became invisible again. Now it’s our turn, he thought as he leafed through the newspaper in the restaurant, lowering his head behind the large sheets for fear a Spaniard at one of the nearby tables might recognize him. ESPAGNE ENSANGLANTÉE — ON FUSILLE ICI COMME ON DÉBOISE. Among the French words, rebounding like pebbles in the dense typography of the paper, were the names of Spanish towns, the geography of the enemy’s inexorable advance toward Madrid, where the flamenco music that played on the radio, broadcast by loudspeakers in the cafés, would be interrupted from time to time by a cornet fanfare and a resonant voice that announced increasingly glorious and unlikely new victories that were received by the public with applause and bullfight olés. DES FEMMES, DES ENFANTS, FUIENT SOUS LE FEU DES INSURGÉS. In a blurred, dark photograph he recognized a straight, white highway, figures advancing, laden animals, a peasant woman holding a nursing child whom she tried to protect from something that came down from the sky. He calculated the enemy’s distance from Madrid, probably reduced now by the rapid advance of recent days. He imagined the repetition of what he’d seen with his own eyes: wagons, donkeys, cars overturned in ditches, militiamen tossing aside rifles and cartridge belts to run faster through the countryside, officers shouting orders no one understood or obeyed. The highway was an overflowing river of human beings, animals, and machines pushed forward by the seismic upheaval of an enemy that was close but still invisible. Beside him, in the back seat of the official automobile caught in a traffic jam of trucks and peasant wagons, among which, absurdly, a flock of goats wandered, Negrín contemplated the disaster with an expression of dejected fatalism, his profile morose against the window, his chin thrust into his fist, while the uniformed driver uselessly blew the horn in an attempt to inch forward. A little beyond the highway stood a white house with a grape arbor, a gentle slope of dark earth recently tilled for autumn planting. In the background, against the clear afternoon sky, rose a great column of thick, black smoke that gave off a smell of gasoline and burned tires. “They’re much closer than we thought,” said Negrín. Hostile or terrified faces pressed against the car windows trying to peer inside. Furious fists and rifle butts struck the roof and sides. “I don’t think they’ll let us get through, Don Juan,” said the militiaman who was their bodyguard and sat beside the driver.

Perhaps Professor Rossman decided to try his luck in Spain because he trusted in the help of his former student Ignacio Abel, who could have saved his life yet did nothing, or almost nothing, for him. Who could have warned him at least, advised him not to talk so loud, or make himself so visible, or tell anyone what had happened in Germany, what he’d seen in Moscow. Abel could have supported him with more conviction and not merely arrange job interviews that led nowhere or hire his daughter to give Lita and Miguel German lessons. But the favors granted least frequently are those that would cost almost nothing: need that is too apparent provokes rejection; the vehemence of a request guarantees it will receive no response. Professor Rossman’s eyes were more faded than he remembered, and his skin was whiter, a little viscous, the skin of someone who’s grown accustomed to living in damp shadows, without the military luster his bald head once displayed, shining under the electric light of a lecture hall on the early nights of winter. Ignacio Abel raised tired eyes from the worktable covered by blueprints and documents in his University City office, and the pale man dressed with funereal severity who called him by name and held out his hand wore the uncertain smile of someone hoping to be recognized. But Dr. Rossman was not an older version of the man Ignacio Abel had met in Weimar in 1923 or to whom he’d said goodbye one day in September 1929 in Barcelona, at the France Station, after visiting the German pavilion at the International Exposition with him and spending hours talking passionately in a café; less than six years later, in April or May of 1935, he was another man, not changed or aged but transfigured, his skin pale as if his blood had been diluted or extracted, his eyes like slightly cloudy water, his gestures as frail and his voice as faint as a convalescent’s, his suit as worn as if he hadn’t taken it off, even to go to sleep, since leaving Barcelona in 1929. When one no longer has a bathroom, a clean bed, and running water, deterioration comes quickly. Very quickly, and at the same time very gradually. Your shirt collar turns darker even though you scrub it in a sink; your shoes stretch, crossed by cracks resembling the wrinkles in a face; the elbows of your jacket, the knees of your trousers, take on the shine of an old cassock or a fly’s wing. Ever since he was a child, Ignacio Abel had instinctively spotted misfortune that afflicted impoverished decent people, respectable tenants late in paying rent in the building where his mother worked as porter: gentlemen with slicked-back hair and misshapen boots who would bend down rapidly to retrieve a cigarette butt from the ground or look furtively inside a garbage can; aging widows who went to Mass, leaving on the staircase a trail of unfathomable stench, their greasy chignons held by combs under mended veils; clerks wearing ties and celluloid collars, their nails dirty, their breath smelling of sour café con leche and ulcers. Seeing Professor Rossman appear without warning in his University City office as if he’d just returned from the land of the dead, Ignacio Abel felt the same mixture of pity and revulsion those people had inspired in him when he was a boy. Professor Rossman’s smile seemed strange now that almost all his teeth were missing. The only thing that remained of his former presence, aside from his formality — the bow tie, hard collar, high shoes, the suit tailored before 1914—was the large briefcase he held with both hands against his chest, the same one he’d drop on his desk in a lecture hall at the Bauhaus, producing a metallic noise of random objects and junk, but more worn now, with the consistency of cracked parchment, as soft as his toothless mouth but still maintaining all the Germanic severity of a professor’s briefcase with its metal buckles and clasps and reinforced corners, the briefcase from which the most unexpected objects would emerge during his classes, like the doves or rabbits or scarves that come out of a magician’s top hat.

One by one, with the comic astonishment of a silent film, Professor Rossman would remove from his apparently bottomless briefcase perfectly ordinary objects that in his hands took on the miraculous quality of the newly invented. In his Weimar class in an unheated lecture hall, where the cold wind blew through broken windowpanes, Professor Karl Ludwig Rossman, without removing his overcoat or scarf, examined as if they were pristine inventions or recently discovered treasures the most mundane tools, the kind that everyone uses every day and no one notices because their invisibility, he’d say, was the measure of their efficiency, the test of a form corresponding to a task — a form often shaped over centuries, even millennia, like the spiral of a shell or the almost flat curvature of a pebble polished by the friction of sand and water at the ocean’s edge. No books, sketches, or architectural magazines came out of Professor Rossman’s briefcase but the tools of carpenters, stonecutters, and masons, plumb lines, spinning tops, clay bowls, a spoon, a pencil, the handle of a coffee grinder, a black rubber ball that rebounded off the ceiling after popping up like a spring before the infantilized eyes of the students, an artist’s brush, a paintbrush, an Italian vase of heavy green glass, a crank of corrugated brass, a packet of cigarette papers, a lightbulb, a baby’s bottle, a pair of scissors. Reality was a labyrinth and a laboratory of objects that were prodigious but so common you easily forgot they didn’t exist in nature but were products of the human imagination. A horizontal plane, he’d say, a staircase. In nature the only horizontal plane was motionless water, the distant horizon at sea. A natural cave or a treetop can suggest the idea of a roof, a column. But what mental process first produced the concept of a staircase? In the icy lecture hall, his hat pulled down to his eyebrows, not removing his overcoat or wool gloves, Professor Rossman, who was susceptible to the cold, could spend an entire class voluptuously concentrating on the form and function of a pair of scissors, the manner in which the two sharpened arms opened like a bird’s beak or an alligator’s jaws and cut a sheet of paper perfectly, cleanly, following a straight or curved line, the sinuous profiled lines of a caricature. His coat pockets were always stuffed with everyday objects, things he would pick up from the ground, and when he probed them with his glove-covered fingers, looking for something specific, he’d usually come across another unexpected object that demanded his attention and fired his enthusiasm. The six sides of a die, dots bored into each one of them, contained the infinite possibilities of chance. Nothing was more beautiful than a well-polished ball rolling on a smooth surface. A tiny match contained the marvelous solution to the millenarian problem of producing and transporting fire. He extracted the match from its box with care, as if he were removing a dried butterfly whose wings could be destroyed if handled too casually, held it between his thumb and index finger, showed it to the students, raising it in a somehow liturgical gesture. He pondered its qualities, the delicate, diminutive pear shape of the head, the body of wood or waxed paper. The box itself, with its complication of angles and the master stroke of intuition it had been to invent two parts that adjusted to each other so effortlessly and at the same time were easy to open. When he struck the match, the tiny sound of the match head running along the thin strip of sandpaper was heard with perfect clarity in the silence of the lecture hall, and the small burst of flame seemed like a miracle. Radiant, like someone who’s successfully completed an experiment, Professor Rossman displayed the burning match. Then he took out a cigarette and lit it as naturally as if he were in a café, and only then, once he had put out the match, did those listening to his exposition emerge from the hypnotic trance they’d been led into without realizing it.

Professor Rossman was like a peddler of the most vulgar, most improbable things. He lectured as easily on the practical virtues of a spoon’s curvature as on the exquisite visual rhythms of the radii of a bicycle wheel in motion. Other professors at the School proselytized for the new, while Professor Rossman revealed the innovation and sophistication that remain hidden and yet produce results in what has always existed. He would clear the middle of the table, place on it a top he’d bought on his way to the School from some children playing in the street, start it twirling with an abrupt, skilled gesture, and watch it spin, as dazzled as if he were witnessing the rotation of a heavenly body. “Invent something like this,” he challenged the students with a smile. “Invent the top, or the spoon, or the pencil. Invent the book that can be carried in a pocket and contains the Iliad or Goethe’s Faust. Invent the match, the jug handle, the scale, the carpenter’s folding ruler, the sewing needle, the scissors. Perfect the wheel or the fountain pen. Think of the time when some of these things didn’t exist.” Then he looked at his wristwatch — he was enthusiastic about this new gadget, which had appeared, according to him, among British officers during the war — picked up his things, placed his lunatic inventor’s or junkman’s objects back in his briefcase, filled his pockets with them, and dismissed the class with a nod and a mock-military click of his heels.

“My dear friend, don’t you remember me?”

But it hadn’t been that long. In Barcelona, less than six years earlier, Professor Rossman, stouter and balder than in Weimar, in one of the suits probably cut by the same tailor who had made them for him before 1914, inspected the final details of the German pavilion at the International Exposition with bird-like gestures and an owl’s pale eyes behind his glasses. He had to be sure everything would be just right when Mies van der Rohe made his grand appearance there, wearing the monocle of a Prussian officer, chewing the long ebony holder into which he inserted cigarettes with a surgical flourish. Professor Rossman took Ignacio Abel’s arm, asked about his work in Spain, lamented that he hadn’t returned to the School now that things had improved so much and there was a new, magnificent campus in Dessau. He passed his hand over a polished surface of dark green marble to check its cleanliness, studied the alignment of a piece of furniture or a sculpture, brought his eyes close to a sign as if to make certain the typography was exact. In the austere, limpid space no one had visited yet, Dr. Rossman seemed even more anachronistic with his stiff collar, high shoes in that 1900 style, and the aloof courtesy of an imperial functionary. But his hands touched objects with the same old avidity, confirming textures, angles, curvatures, and in his eyes was the same permanent mixture of interrogation and amazement, a brazen urgency to see everything, a childish joy at incessant discoveries. Now his jovial disposition had been strengthened along with his physical presence, and he recalled with relief the not so distant past of uncertainty, inflation, hunger, days when he carried a boiled potato, his only food for the day, in his bottomless briefcase or in a coat pocket, when in the unheated lecture halls of the School it was so cold he couldn’t hold the chalk between his frostbitten fingers. “But you remember as well, my friend, you spent the winter of 1923 with us.” Now Professor Rossman looked at the future with a serenity tempered by the basic mistrust of someone who’s already seen the world drown once. “You have to come back to Germany. You won’t recognize Berlin. You can’t imagine the number of new, beautiful buildings being built. You can see them in the magazines, of course, but you know it’s not the same thing. Berlin resembles New York. You have to see the new neighborhoods with workers’ housing, the big department stores, the lights at night. Things we dreamed about at the School in the middle of the disaster seem to have become reality. A few, not many. But you know how something well made, even if small, can make a difference.”

The value of objects, instruments, tools. The beauty of the pavilion that took one’s breath away, staggered the soul, something tangible and of this world though it seemed not to belong to it entirely, too pure perhaps, too perfect in the purity of its right angles and smooth surfaces, alien not only to most of the other buildings in the Exposition but to reality itself, to the raw light and harshness of life in Spain. There may be a depraved, baroque quality in poverty, just as there is in ostentation. One September morning in 1929, Ignacio Abel strolled with Professor Rossman through the German pavilion, where hammers still sounded and laborers were hard at work, where footsteps and voices echoed in the uninhabited spaces, and he noticed a sting of skepticism in his own enthusiasm. Or perhaps it was simply resentment at not being able to imagine anything similar, a building that would justify his life even though it was destined to be demolished after a few months. Like a brilliant composition that won’t be played again after its premiere, the score would remain, perhaps a recording, the inexact recollections of those who heard it. Active, loquacious, attentive to everything, Professor Rossman supervised the construction so that everything would be ready when his colleague Mies van der Rohe arrived from Germany, and afterward Rossman toured Barcelona with his wife and daughter, whom he photographed in front of Gaudí’s buildings, which seemed to him nonsensical, yet were endowed with a beauty that struck him all the more because it contradicted all his own principles. His wife was fat, short, and phlegmatic, his daughter tall, thin, and ungainly, with an intense look behind her gold-framed eyeglasses. And Professor Rossman between the two, cheerful to no end, asking a passerby to take a picture of the three of them, extolling buildings and views that neither mother nor daughter looked at, praising the local delicacies they both wolfed down mindlessly, waiting for an opportunity to drop them off at the hotel and allow himself to be carried downriver to the port by the human current on the Ramblas.

“How are your wife and children? A boy and a girl, isn’t that so? I remember your showing me pictures of them when we were in Weimar and they were very small. Still too young to argue politics with you. My wife misses the kaiser and feels sympathy for Hitler. The only defect she finds in him is that he’s so anti-Semitic. And my daughter belongs to the Communist Party. She lives in a house with central heating and hot water but longs for a communal apartment in Moscow. She hates Hitler, but much less than she hates the Social Democrats, including me: she must think I’m the worst of the bunch. What a magnificent Freudian drama to be the daughter of a Social Fascist, a Social Imperialist. Perhaps deep down my daughter admires Hitler just as much as her mother does, and the only defect she finds in him is that he’s so anti-Communist.” Professor Rossman laughed with some benevolence, as if at heart he attributed the muddled politics of his wife and daughter to a certain congenital intellectual weakness of the female mind, or as if over the years he’d developed a tolerance somewhere between being resigned to and sardonic about the extremes of human foolishness. “But tell me what you’re working on now, my friend, what projects you have. I’m happy to know you’re completely innocent of the esthetic crime that is the Spanish pavilion at the Exposition.” Professor Rossman’s oval head stopped moving, and his eyes, enlarged by his glasses, focused on him with an affectionate attention that made Ignacio Abel feel bewildered as someone much younger, a student not certain he can endure the scrutiny of the professor who knows him well. What had he done in those years that could measure up to what he’d learned in Germany, to the expectations he’d had for himself and his work? The nocturnal lights and strong colors of Berlin, the calm of Weimar, the libraries, the joy of finally penetrating a language he’d handled until then only laboriously and to which his ears suddenly opened up as naturally as if he’d removed plugs of wax, the lecture halls at Weimar, those rainy nightfalls of self-reflection, lamps lit behind curtains, bicycle bells echoing in the silence. The cold, too, and the scarcity of everything, but he didn’t care or notice very much. The hooves of policemen’s horses raising sparks on the paving stones, the solemn, angry demonstrations by unemployed workers in berets and leather jackets and red armbands, the placards and red flags lit by torches, the veterans with amputated limbs begging on the sidewalks, displaying stumps under the rags of their uniforms or faces doubly disfigured by war wounds and surgeries. The young women in short skirts, eyes and lips painted, chin-length hair, sitting on the terraces of Berlin cafés with their legs crossed, smoking cigarettes on which they left red lipstick marks, walking with determination along the sidewalks without male companions, jumping onto streetcars after the offices closed, heels clicking as they hurried down the metro steps.

He didn’t think about Spain during those months of great intensity. He was thirty-four years old and felt a physical agility and intellectual excitement he hadn’t known when he was twenty. He imagined for himself another life, limitless and also impossible, in which the weight, the extortion of the past didn’t count, the sadness of his marriage, the perpetual demands of his children. After a few months his time in Germany was gone like a sum that would have seemed inexhaustible to a man accustomed to handling only small amounts of money. He returned to Madrid in the early summer heat of 1924, and nothing had changed. His son had begun to walk. The girl didn’t recognize him and took frightened refuge in her mother’s arms. No one asked him anything about his time in Germany. He went to the office of the Council for Advanced Studies to submit the required report on his travels, and the bureaucrat who received it filed it away promptly and handed him a stamped receipt. Now, in Barcelona, Professor Rossman asked what he’d done in those five years, and his life, full of tasks and compromises, seemed to dissolve into nothingness, like the feverish expectations of his months in Weimar, like those dreams in which one feels exalted by a splendid idea that on waking turns out to be insignificant. Efforts that at some point end in frustration, assignments without result, projects in ruins — or, to quote from an article by Ortega y Gasset, Spain was a nation of projects in ruins. But at least there was a promising expectation, he told Professor Rossman, superstitiously fearing it would come to nothing because he’d mentioned it: a market in a working-class district of Madrid, close to the street where he’d been born, and something even more improbable, but also more tempting, which almost made him dizzy: a position in the Department of Design and Construction at Madrid’s University City. Professor Rossman, with his versatile, polyglot curiosity, with his interest in everything, had already heard about the project, which had an unusual breadth for Europe — he’d read something in an international magazine. “Write to me,” he told Ignacio Abel when they were saying goodbye. “Let me know how everything goes. I wish you could come sometime to teach a course at the School. Let me know how your ideal city of knowledge progresses.”

But neither wrote to the other. The promises, the good things they wished each other as they were leaving, were as abundant and unreal as the stacks of German bills that filled one’s pockets and weren’t enough to buy a cup of coffee. Suddenly time accelerates, and the children have grown without your being aware of it. On land where nothing existed — where pine groves had been uprooted by steam shovels, the ground leveled, the plain subdivided by imaginary lines — there are now streets with sidewalks, but no houses, young trees, buildings emerging from the mud, some completed but still empty, some inaugurated and put to use, the School of Philosophy and Letters Building is occupied, though masons, carpenters, and painters continue to work there, though students have to cut across open country and walk around ditches and piles of building materials to reach it. Through the windows of his office he could see the red blocks of the Schools of Medicine and of Pharmacy, almost finished on the outside, the structure of the University Hospital, surrounded by swarms of laborers, donkeys, trucks carrying materials, armed guards patrolling the site. Farther on past the somber green of oaks and pines, and above that, on a more distant plane, the outline of the Sierra, its highest peaks still snow-covered. It’s almost six on the large office clock, too late to receive a visitor who doesn’t have an appointment. The calendar shows a date in May 1935, which Ignacio Abel will cross out just before he leaves. He looked up from the board on which a student had spread a plan, and the pale old man from the other world smiled at him awkwardly, his eyes watery, stretching wide a mouth filled with ruined teeth, extending his hand, the other pressing against his chest the black briefcase, as immediately recognizable as his accent and stiff comportment from another century, the briefcase in which he no longer kept dazzling objects with which he’d transmit to his students the mystery of the practical forms that make life better: now he kept documents, certificates in Gothic print and gilt seals no longer worth anything, printed requests for visas in a variety of languages, copies of letters to embassies, official letters that denied him something in neutral language or demanded yet another certificate, some insignificant but inaccessible paper, some consular stamp without which the months of waiting and delays would have been in vain.

“Professor Rossman, what a pleasant surprise. When did you get here?”

“My friend, my dear Professor Abel, you wouldn’t believe what has happened. But don’t worry about me, I see you’re busy, I don’t mind waiting.”