In the Night of Time

5

A BLACK SILHOUETTE crossed the illuminated rectangle of the screen where the slides were being projected, next to the podium from which Ignacio Abel gave his lecture. His nerves settled down when he began to speak. He was calmed by the clear sound of his own voice, the sturdy podium on which he rested his hands. Before walking onstage he’d been comforted by the warm sound of the audience filling the hall, after having been afraid that no one would attend the lecture, his fear growing as the day approached; how embarrassed he felt that morning trying to hide his anxiety from Adela and the children during breakfast and then excusing himself from the table, explaining he would rather walk to the Student Residence by himself. He’d been speaking only a few minutes when he’d asked that the lights in the auditorium be turned off, and the murmur of the audience dissolved into silence. On the podium, a lamp with a green shade reflected the white of the written pages onto his face, hardening his features with areas of shadow. He looked older than he was, as seen from the first row where Adela and their daughter were sitting, both nervous, Adela with a shy, protective tenderness, uneasy about his male vanity, the girl proud of the high, solitary appearance of her father onstage, distinguished in his bow tie and reading glasses, which he put on and took off depending on whether he consulted his notes or spoke without looking at them. The girl, Lita, who at the age of fourteen has a precocious love of painting, encouraged by her teachers at the Institute School, appreciates the composition of the scene whose fleeting center is the profile of a female shadow, moving in front of a slide projected on the screen behind her father’s back. She’s flattered that they’ve allowed her to attend the talk; that her father is aware of her and has signaled to her from the podium; that these cultured, amiable ladies whom her mother invites to tea from time to time have come this evening — Doña María de Maeztu, Señora Bonmati de Salinas, Juan Ramón Jiménez’s wife, who has such a pretty name, Zenobia, Zenobia Camprubí—and accepted her without condescension, remarking on how grown-up she looked. (Adela phoned the ladies to make certain they’d attend; she’d been infected by the fear she guessed at in him, the fear there would be no audience; she made the calls without his knowledge in order not to wound his pride.) Lita hoped the interruption hadn’t distracted her father, who complained so often at home about how loudly the maids played the radio, about the arguments between Lita and her brother. He remained silent, his glasses in one hand and in the other the pointer he used to indicate details in the slides, like a teacher in front of a map, wearing an irritated expression that Adela and the girl recognized, though it was subtle, when the door of the hall opened and a woman in high-heeled shoes walked in, her steps resounding on the wooden floor in spite of the caution of her movements. Caution and a certain insolence, or simply the awkwardness of someone who arrives late and has to move about in semidarkness. She passed in front of the beam of light from the projector, the entire length of the first row, toward an empty seat in the corner. I see the silhouette, moving and at the same time frozen, the profile against the screen as in a shadow play, the skirt made of light fabric like an inverted corolla. Ignacio Abel made it a point to stay silent, following the newcomer with his eyes and not hiding his annoyance. That evening in the Residence, in the darkened hall where he could barely make out the familiar faces in the audience — Adela, his daughter, Señora de Salinas, Zenobia, Moreno Villa, Negrín, the engineer Torroja, the architect López Otero, Professor Rossman, far in the back, his bald oval head among women’s hats — he was pleased by the strong, clear sound of his own voice and the attention he was getting, which had a lightly euphoric effect after the first few minutes of settling in, after the noise in the hall and the scraping of chairs, and after the several days of insecurity he wouldn’t have admitted to anyone came to an end. The silhouette of the newcomer was outlined on the slide of a peasant façade, a house built in the middle of the eighteenth century, he explained, looking at his notes, in a southern city, conceived not by an architect but a master builder who knew his trade and, literally, the ground he walked on: the earth that produced the sandy, golden stone of the lintel over the door and windows, the clay for the bricks and tiles, the lime that had whitened the façade, leaving exposed, with admirable esthetic intuition, only the stone of the lintels, delicately carved by a master stonecutter who’d also sculpted, in the center of the lintel, a calyx situated exactly at the axis of the building. He signaled for the next slide, a detail of the angle of the lintel. With the pointer he indicated the diagonal of the joint of two ashlars that formed the corner, where two contrary forces balanced with a mathematical precision that was even more astonishing given that the men who conceived and built the structure probably didn’t know how to read or write. Stone and lime, he said, thick walls that insulated against both heat and cold, small windows avoiding obvious symmetry and distributed according to an irregular order related to the slant of the sun’s rays, and white lime that best reflected the sunlight and eased the interior temperature during the summer months. With mortar and reeds that grew along nearby streams, they created natural insulation for the roofs of the highest rooms — the technique essentially the same one used in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Architects of the German school—“myself among them,” he noted with a smile, knowing that isolated laughter would be heard in the hall — always speak of organic construction. What could be more organic than the people’s instinct to use what was closest at hand and flexibly adapt a timeless vocabulary to immediate conditions, the climate and ways of earning a living and the demands of the work, reinventing elemental forms that were always new yet never yielded to whim, that stood out in the landscape and at the same time fused with it, without ostentation or mechanical repetition, transmitted throughout the country and from one generation to the next like old ballads that don’t need to be transcribed because they survive in the current of the people’s memory, in the discipline without vanity of the best artisans. At the rear of the hall, in spite of the darkness, he guessed at or almost discerned the approving smile of Professor Rossman, leaning forward so as not to miss any of the Spanish words: the intuition of forms, the integrity of materials and procedures, courtyards paved with river pebbles tracing a rotating visual rhythm, tiles fitted together with the organic precision of fish scales. (He’d said that word again; from now on he had to avoid it.) As he spoke, he became less self-conscious and his gestures lost their initial rigidity, which perhaps only Adela had noticed, just as she noticed how his voice became more natural. He showed a paved courtyard with columns and a fountain in the center, which could have been in Crete or Rome but belonged to an apartment house in Córdoba, its form so well adapted to its function that it had endured with only minor variations for several millennia. Light and shade shaped just like the material — light, shade, sound, the flow of water in a fountain refreshing a courtyard, the opacity of the outside walls, the daylight that enters from above and spreads through rooms and hallways. Who’d be presumptuous enough to affirm that functional architecture — he almost said “organic”—was a twentieth-century invention? But it was fraudulent to imitate external forms by parodying them; one had to learn from processes, not results, the syntax of a language and not isolated words. Iron, steel, wide sheets of glass, and reinforced concrete would have to be employed with the same awareness of their material qualities that the plebeian architect possessed when he used reeds or clay or stones with sharp edges to erect a dividing wall, instinctively taking advantage of the form of each stone to fit it to the others, not feeling obliged to force it into an external mold. He showed a slide of a shepherd’s hut made of interwoven straw and rushes, another of the interior of a mountain shelter where with stones but no mortar a vault had been built that had the rugged solidity of a Romanesque apse. The chance form of each slab was transformed into necessity when it was fitted as if by magnetic attraction to the form of another. And at the heart of everything was the people’s instinct for making full use of scarcity, their talent in turning limitations into advantages. Until now the slides had shown only buildings. The click of the projector sounded and the screen was filled by a peasant family posing in front of one of the huts with eaves of admirably woven straw and rushes. Dark faces stared into the hall, the large eyes of barefoot, big-bellied children dressed in rags, a gaunt pregnant woman holding a child, a lean, dry man beside her in a white shirt, trousers tied at the waist with rope, and sandals made of esparto grass. In the Residence Hall the picture was something like documentation of a trip to a remote country sunk in primitivism. Just as he used the pointer earlier to indicate architectural details, Ignacio Abel now pointed out the faces he’d photographed only a few months earlier in a village of phantasmagorical poverty in the Sierra de Málaga. Architecture, he said, didn’t consist of inventing abstract forms, and the Spanish plebeian tradition wasn’t a catalogue of the picturesque to be shown to foreigners or used decoratively in the pavilion of a fair. The architecture of a new time had to be a tool in the great task of improving people’s lives, alleviating suffering, bringing justice, or better yet, or said more precisely, making accessible what the family in the slide had never seen and didn’t know existed: running water, airy spaces, a school, food that was sufficient and, if possible, tasty; not a gift but restitution, not charity but an act of reparation for unremunerated labor, for the skill of hands and the fineness of minds that had known how to choose the best rushes and braid them to hold up a straw roof or make a basket, the proper clay to whitewash the walls of a hut. From what those people have created over the centuries come almost the only solid, noble things in Spain, he said, original and incomparable, music and ballads and buildings. He was moved, Adela noted from the first row and privately shared his emotion. Ignacio Abel forced himself to contain an effusiveness that took him by surprise. He wasn’t quite sure where it came from, rising from his stomach, as if he were suddenly possessed not by memories of his father and the masons and stonecutters who worked with him, the ones who erected buildings and paved streets and dug foundations and tunnels and then disappeared from the earth without a trace, but by the awareness of those who’d lived before, several generations of peasants from whom he descended, those who’d lived and died in mud huts identical to the one in the slide, as poor, as obstinate, as lacking in a future as those people whose faces were fading, now that the lights in the hall had been turned on but the slide projector had not yet been turned off.

In a drawer in his study locked with a small key, useless now, which Ignacio Abel continues to carry in his pocket, is the folded sheet announcing the lecture. The smallest things can last a long time, immune to abandonment and even the physical disappearance of the person who held them in his hands. A yellow sheet, somewhat faded, the line of the fold so worn that after a few years it will fall apart if someone attempts to open it, if it hasn’t been burned or tossed in the trash, if it doesn’t disappear beneath the rubble of the house after one of the enemy bombing raids the following winter. He found the handbill in a pocket of the jacket he hadn’t worn since then, but by now it was a secret clue, the material proof of the start of another life that began that evening, without anything announcing it, not even the silhouette crossing in front of the slide projector. The day and the year, the place and the hour, like an unearthed inscription that permits the dating of an archeological find: Tuesday, October 7, 1935, 7:00 in the evening, the Auditorium of the Student Residence, Pinar 21, Madrid. Ignacio Abel folded the sheet carefully, with a certain clandestine feeling, and locked it in the same drawer that held his first letters from Judith Biely.

If not for that paper printed in the Residence’s noble, austere typography, perhaps he wouldn’t have proof of the date he heard her name for the first time. But a few minutes before someone introduced them, he’d already recognized her in a kind of flash when, as he concluded his talk, the lights in the auditorium went on and he bowed with some discomfort when he heard well-mannered applause and woke from a fervor he now privately regretted or was embarrassed by, looking sideways toward the end of the first row where Adela and the girl, Señora de Salinas, Zenobia Camprubí, and María de Maeztu in her twisted hat were all sitting, and next to them, incongruous and young, exotic with her fair hair, pale skin, and energetic applause, the stranger who’d irritated him when she came in late. He remembered the woman at the piano, her back to him, who’d turned around, just as he recalled the ripe autumnal quality of the sunlight shining on her hair.

He embraced his daughter, who ran toward him as soon as he came down from the stage. “Why isn’t your brother here with all of you?” “He had a German lesson with Señorita Rossman. Have you seen her father? Mamá couldn’t get away from him.” Professor Rossman made his way through the crowd, enveloped him in his oppressive Germanic cordiality, his sour smell of unwashed clothing, a squalid pensión, and prostate disease. (“Professor Rossman smells like old cat piss,” his son once protested with the savage sincerity of a child.) “An excellent speech, my dear friend, excellent. You don’t know how grateful I am for your invitation, yet another courtesy I can’t reciprocate.” Behind the thick lenses of his round glasses, Professor Rossman’s colorless eyes were wet with emotion, an excessive gratitude Ignacio Abel would have preferred not to receive. He did, in fact, smell of uric acid and had on a suit he had worn too much, and his bald oval head shone with sweat. He now scraped a living by selling fountain pens in cafés and with the small amount of money Ignacio Abel paid his daughter to give German lessons to Miguel and Lita. “But I don’t want to keep you, my friend — you have many people to greet.” Ignacio Abel moved away, and Dr. Rossman remained alone, isolated by his obvious state of impoverished foreignness and misfortune.

While he looked after the ladies and accepted congratulations, agreed with comments, thought before responding to questions, Ignacio Abel looked through the crowd for the blond woman, fearing she’d left. It comforted his vanity that so many people had attended. The booming voice and corpulence of Don Juan Negrín stood out from the civilized murmur of the others. “I was the one who proposed to López Otero that he hire our friend Abel when we began construction of University City, and as you see, I wasn’t wrong,” he heard Negrín say, in the center of a vaguely official group, with his mouth full. Waiters in short jackets held trays of small sandwiches and served glasses of wine, grenadine, and lemon soft drinks. Professor Rossman bowed stiffly to people who didn’t know him or didn’t remember that they’d been introduced, and took canapés as the trays passed, eating some and putting others in his jacket pocket. When he returned to the pensión that night, he’d share them with his daughter. Ignacio Abel looked at him out of the corner of his eye, conscious of too many things at the same time, constantly torn by feelings that were too disparate.

“Juan Ramón would have liked so much to hear the lovely things you said this evening,” Zenobia Camprubí commented. “‘The cubist rigor of white Andalusian villages’—how beautiful. And how grateful I am that you quoted him. But you know how delicate his health is, how difficult it is for him to set foot outside.”

“Ignacio always says your husband has an instinctive sense of architecture,” Adela said. “He never tires of admiring the composition of his books, the covers, the typography.”

“Not only that.” Ignacio Abel smiled, looked furtively beyond the circle of ladies who surrounded him, and didn’t notice his wife’s annoyance. “The poems, above all. The precision of each word.”

Moreno Villa spoke with the blond foreigner, gesticulating a great deal, leaning against the piano, and she, taller than he, nodded and occasionally let her glance wander over the crowd.

“I thought it went without saying that we don’t admire Juan Ramón because of the external beauty of his books,” said Adela, suddenly very shy, deeply humiliated, like a much younger woman. Zenobia pressed her gloved hand.

“Of course, Adela darling. We all understood what you meant.”

A photographer circulating through the crowd asked Ignacio Abel to allow him to take a picture. “It’s for Ahora.” Abel moved away from the ladies and observed that his daughter looked at him with pride, and the blond woman turned when she noticed the flash. The following day he was irritated to see himself in the newspaper photo with an overly complacent smile he hadn’t been aware of and perhaps gave other people an idea of him that he disliked. The esteemed architect Señor Abel, associate director of construction at University City, spoke brilliantly last night on the rich history of traditional Spanish popular architecture to a select audience who gathered to hear him in the auditorium of the Student Residence. Cigarette smoke, the clink of glasses, the gloved, mobile hands of the women, the delicate veils of their hats, the civilized sound of conversations. Judith Biely’s laugh burst like a glass breaking on the polished wood floor. He would have liked to detach himself heedlessly from the admiring circle of ladies and walk straight across the hall to her.

“I liked the comparison of architecture and music,” said Señora de Salinas in an almost inaudible voice; she always had an air somewhere between fatigue and absence. “Do you really believe there’s no middle ground between the popular tradition and the modern objects of the twentieth century?”

“The nineteenth century is all bourgeois adornment and bad copies,” the engineer Torroja interrupted. “Pastry decorations made of stucco instead of cream.”

“I agree,” said Moreno Villa. “The trouble is, the fine arts in Spain haven’t come into the twentieth century yet. The public is bullheaded and patrons are backward.”

“You only have to look at the villa with fake Mudéjar tiles where his excellency the president of the Republic has his private residence.”

“Architecture for the bandstand.”

“Worse, the bullring.”

Moreno Villa and the blond woman had gradually approached. She wasn’t as young as she’d seemed at a distance because of her haircut and self-assurance. Her features looked as if they’d been drawn with a precise, fine pencil. An old acquaintance of the ladies and their eminent husbands, Moreno Villa carried out with old-fashioned ease the protocol of introductions. I looked at you up close for the first time and it seemed I’d always known you and that no one but you was in that hall. With secret male disloyalty, Ignacio Abel saw his wife comparing herself to the young foreigner whose strange name he heard for the first time without catching the surname. A Spanish woman, mature, widened by motherhood and the neglect of age, her hair waved in a style that had become out-of-date, so similar to the other women, her friends and acquaintances, fond of midafternoon teas, artistic and literary talks for ladies at the Lyceum Club, the wives of professors, midlevel government dignitaries, inhabitants of an enlightened and rather fictitious Madrid that took on something of reality only in places like the Residence, or in the shop of popular Spanish crafts run by Zenobia Camprubí.

“Will you forgive me for coming late to your lecture? I’m always in a rush and I lost my way in the halls,” Judith said.

“If you’ll forgive me for interrupting your rehearsal the other day.”

But she hadn’t noticed, or didn’t remember.

“My dear Abel, give me a hug. You’ve won two ears and a tail in a very demanding bullring — excuse the metaphor, since I know you hate the national pastime.” Negrín broke in with his excessive presence, the physical pride of a large man in a country of short men. Moreno Villa made the introductions, and this time Ignacio Abel listened closely to the foreigner’s name.

“Biely,” said Negrín. “Isn’t that Russian?”

“My parents were Russian. They immigrated to America at the beginning of the century.” Judith spoke a clear, careful Spanish. “Don’t you like bullfights?”

When she asked the question she looked at Ignacio Abel in a way that canceled out the presence of Negrín and Moreno Villa. His daughter came toward him, took his hand, told him in a quiet voice that her mother was a little tired. The time he spent with Judith would always be measured, threatened, always subject to someone’s questioning, to an anguished usury of hours and minutes, of wristwatches you don’t want to look at yet glance at sideways, public clocks that slowly approach the hour of an appointment or mark with indifference the inexorable moment of saying goodbye that can’t be put off any longer.

“Our friend Abel feels the same as the eminent husband of Señora Camprubí, who’s here now,” said Negrín. Adela and Zenobia had approached the group. Adela looked at the foreigner to whom she hadn’t been introduced with the distrustful curiosity she frequently displayed with strangers, men or women. “His secular, anti-military, and anti-bullfight principles are so solid that his worst nightmare would be a battlefield Mass in a bullring.”

Negrín celebrated his own joke with a laugh. He could no more control the volume of his voice than the pressure of his hand, and didn’t realize that Judith Biely hadn’t completely understood what he said, spoken rapidly and enveloped in the noise of nearby conversations.

“Great Spanish intellectuals have written beautiful things about bullfighting.” Judith had thought out the entire sentence in Spanish before daring to say it.

“It would be better for everyone if they wrote about things that were more serious and less barbaric,” said Ignacio Abel, regretting it immediately because he noticed that she blushed, the foreign pink of her skin more intense on her cheeks and neck, like a rash.

Adela reproached him afterward in the taxi, as they were crossing the deserted edges of Madrid at night, with stretches of unlit building lots and streetcar tracks that would be lost in rural darkness beyond the last illuminated corners. “How cold you are sometimes, my dear. You don’t moderate your words or realize the overly serious face you put on. First you make me look ridiculous in front of Zenobia and then you say something rude about the bullfights to that poor foreign girl who was only trying to make polite conversation. She must have felt awful. You never gauge your strength. You don’t seem to realize how much you can wound. Or maybe you do, and that’s why you do it.” But what she was rebuking him for, not with her words but with the tone in which she pronounced them, was that he’d looked to her to alleviate his insecurity but afterward hadn’t shared his relief and satisfaction at his success, hadn’t bothered to thank her or even to notice the deep conjugal emotion that she, docile and at the same time protective, felt, the too-comforting admiration he no longer seemed to need. Leaning back in the cab, exhausted, lightheaded, Ignacio Abel looked with some private hostility at Adela’s profile, so close, so overly familiar, the face of a woman he suddenly realized he didn’t love, with whom he hadn’t associated the idea of love for many years, if he ever had. He couldn’t recall. He could perhaps recover a trace of old tenderness by identifying in the faces of his children the features of a much younger Adela. But he was reluctant to think about the past, the years of their engagement, and perhaps he was ashamed of having loved her more than he was now willing to remember, with an antiquated, verbose love, almost the kind found on a hand-colored romantic postcard, the love of the young, ignorant man it had been difficult for him to stop being, the man Adela recalled with a memory that was both compassionate and ironic. What she saw in him couldn’t be detected now by anyone who knew only the accomplished, solid man of today, none of the ladies who’d watched and listened to him this evening at the Residence, tall on the platform, well dressed in his pinstriped suit and handmade shoes, his flexible high-quality collar and English bow tie. She’d tied the bow before he left the apartment. They saw the finished man, not the precarious rough drafts that had preceded him, the architect who projected images of old Andalusian houses and German buildings with right angles, broad windows, and nautical railings on the terraces, who knew how to pronounce names in German and English and appropriately interrupt a serious exposition with an ironic aside that flattered the audience by presupposing their ability to catch it. But she, Adela, sitting next to their daughter and her friends in the first row, pleased by her husband’s brilliance, knew things about him the others did not, and could measure the distance between the man of this evening and the unpolished, half-grown boy he was when they first met, calibrate the degree of artifice in his manner and worldliness, for at those moments everything in him was too irreproachable to be completely true. Although it may not matter to you, there’s no one in this world who can love you more than I because there’s no one who has known you so intimately your whole life and not just a few months or a few years. The scorned lover is a legitimist who vainly defends ancestral rights no one believes in. She doesn’t see the signs, doesn’t suspect what’s incubating inside him, in the still unmodified presence of the other, doesn’t perceive the slightly greater degree of ill will in his silence, the secret, not fully conscious disloyalty of the man who rides beside her in the taxi, tired and content, relieved to be returning home, mentally listing the people he knew who attended his lecture, the ones Heraldo, Ahora, and El Sol will mention tomorrow in articles he’ll look for with disguised impatience, for his vanity lies in not showing his vanity, and it disconcerts him not to be immune to the weakness that he finds so unpleasant in others. Now the taxi was driving down Calle Príncipe de Vergara, advancing more slowly along the row of young trees on the central promenade, some displaying the dimmed bulbs and paper pennants of a recent festival. “We’re close to home now,” said the girl, who sat next to the driver, erect and attentive, as if responsibility for their ride home had been entrusted to her. Coming toward them on the sidewalk were an older man and a tall, thin woman holding his arm, walking close to the wall on their way to the metro station. “Look, Papá, we’re lucky, Professor Rossman got here ahead of us and has already picked up his daughter.”