In the Night of Time

6

THE SAME MUSIC had brought him to Judith for a second time. In the echoing corridor of an office building in Madrid, a distant song had invoked a feeling of familiarity at first, clarinet and piano becoming more distinct, then fading as if the wind had changed. He looked at the numbered doors of offices where he heard the ringing of telephones and the clatter of typewriters, and it took him a while to identify where the sudden vibration of recognition came from; he’d heard the same song just before he opened the door to the auditorium in the Residence, expecting to find Moreno Villa, on that afternoon whose date he was certain of because it was the day of San Miguel. But he didn’t know the song had stayed with him. He knew it now, as the isolated thread of the melody joined the two images he had of Judith and wakened a vague expectation of seeing her again. Even after seeing her again at the Residence and desiring her, he could have forgotten her in the end. During that period of obsessive immersion in his work, his states of mind were as transient as the shapes of clouds. Beyond his drawing board and the large model of University City, the external world was a confused hum, like a landscape in the window that becomes more blurred as the speed of the train increases. Political passion, which had never put down deep roots in him, had been dampened over the years, tempered by skepticism and a distrust of exaggerated emotions, guttural manifestoes, and Spanish torrents of words. As distractedly as he looked over newspaper headlines or listened to the eight o’clock news on the radio, he withstood erratic squalls of dejection or impatience, familial annoyance, remorse with no visible motive, longing with no object. Urgency carried him from one place to another, as isolated in his tasks as he was inside the small Fiat he drove fast across Madrid. With no effort the attraction he’d felt for the foreign woman he saw in profile, crossing the projector’s beam of light, had weakened — the attraction of an exotic presence that was intensely carnal and at the same time as intangible as a promise was contained not in her attitude or words but in her very presence, the shape of her face, the color of her hair and eyes, the timbre of her voice, and something else not in her, the promise of so many unfulfilled and often unformed desires in him, roused by Judith’s proximity as if by a clap of hands or a voice revealing the dimensions of a great area of darkness. In the promise was a portion of nostalgia for what had never happened, and regret for what probably wouldn’t happen now. Life could not be only what he already knew; something or someone had to be waiting for him down the road, just around the corner, in the narrow swaying streetcar he watched coming up an avenue, tracks shining in the sun on the paving stones, or behind the revolving door of a café, something or someone in the mists of the future, as soon as tomorrow or the next minute. No longer believing, he continued to wait; the loss or decline of faith didn’t eliminate expectation of the miracle. Something would come leaping over everything: the project for a building that would resemble no other; the richer, denser life of excitements and textures he’d glimpsed, almost touched, in Germany for barely a year, the time that had seemed the start of his true existence and turned out to be simply a parenthesis that disappeared with the passage of the years, the delayed conclusion to his youth. Slim, independent, foreign, talking to a group of men with a naturalness that would have been unusual in a Spanish woman, Judith Biely had attracted him perhaps because she reminded him of the young women in Berlin and Weimar, coming out in groups in the late afternoon from department stores and office buildings, typists, secretaries, salesclerks, leaving behind them a scent of lipstick and the sweet smoke of American cigarettes, the brims of their hats tilted down to their eyes, their light clothing and athletic strides, dashing fearlessly across streets and past automobiles and streetcars. What excited him most was that easy confidence he’d never seen in Spain, which stimulated and intimidated him at the same time. When he was in his thirties, an architect and a family man, with a grant from the government to study abroad, dressed somberly in the Spanish manner, the women who walked along the streets or chatted in cafés with their cigarettes and drinks, their short skirts, crossed legs, and red lips, tossing their straight hair as they gestured, awakened in him an excitement and fear very similar to those of adolescence. Sexual desire was indistinguishable from enthusiasm for what he was learning and the tremors of discovery: night lights, the sound of the trains, the joy of truly submerging himself in a language and beginning to master it, his ears opening as well as his eyes, his mind overflowing with so many stimuli he didn’t know how to avoid, and when he spoke German with a little fluency, without realizing it he acquired an identity that was not completely the one so tediously his, but lighter, like his body when he went out each morning, ready to take in everything, giving himself over to the clamor of Berlin or the tranquility of the heavily tree-lined streets of Weimar where he would pedal his bicycle on the way to the School, delighting in the sound of tires on the paving stones and the soft wind on his face. In the unheated lecture halls of the Bauhaus almost half the students were women, all of them much younger than he. At a party, a woman named Mitzi had kissed him, putting her tongue in his mouth and leaving in his saliva an aftertaste of alcohol and tobacco. Later she sneaked back with him to his room at the pensión, and when he turned around after looking for the book he’d promised to lend her, she was naked on the bed, slim, white, shivering with cold. Never before had a woman undressed in front of him like that. He’d never been with so young a woman, who took the initiative with a spontaneity at once delicate and obscene. Under the blankets she seemed about to come apart in his arms, as open and succulent as her mouth had been a few hours earlier at the party. She said she came from a large family in Hungary that had been ruined. She communicated by moving at will from German to French, and he heard her murmuring incomprehensible words in Hungarian, like phonetic splatters in his ear. She’d begun studying architecture, but at the School discovered that photography mattered more to her. She searched in nature and in ordinary places for the abstract visual forms her compatriot Moholy-Nagy, who also was or had been her lover, taught her to see. She gave herself in love with her eyes open and as if offering herself for a human sacrifice in which she was both priest and victim. When she took the initiative, she’d come with a shudder as if in a methodical trance that was somewhat distracted, even indifferent. Afterward she’d light a cigarette and smoke stretched out on the bed, her legs open, a knee raised, and just by looking at her he’d be consumed again with desire. The presumed Hungarian ex-countess or ex-marquise lived in a basement that had only a straw mattress and an open suitcase with her clothing, and above that a sink and mirror. In a corner, on an imposing porcelain stove that rarely gave off adequate heat, a pot of potatoes simmered. No salt, no butter, nothing, only boiled potatoes that she ate in an anarchic way throughout the day or night, piercing them with a fork and blowing to cool them before she began chewing. He remembered her sitting on the mattress with his overcoat around her thin shoulders, hair disheveled, leaning over the pot and stabbing a potato with the fork, a lit cigarette in her other hand, chewing with a purr of contentment. What most disconcerted Ignacio Abel was her lack of any trace of modesty. She burst into laughter the first night when he tried to turn off the light. For years he became inconsolably excited on sleepless nights as he lay next to Adela’s wide, sleeping body, remembering the intoxicated smile that sometimes was in her eyes when she raised her head between his thighs to catch her breath or see in his face the effect of what she was doing to him with her tongue and thin lips, where the line of color had been erased; what no woman had done to him before and, he imagined, what wouldn’t happen to him again; what she did with the same surrender and indifference, he soon discovered with an attack of rustic Spanish jealousy, to other students at the School in addition to her professor of photography. At some point Mitzi disappeared, and he, humiliated and ridiculous, went looking for her. He was wounded in particular by the astonishment and slight mockery with which she listened to his old-fashioned, offended lover’s complaints expressed in awkward German. No one had an exclusive right to her. Had she put any conditions on him, ever asked him to turn the photo of his wife and two children on the night table to the wall? How was he so sure he was enough to satisfy her? When he tried to hold her she got away, slipping her sweaty, agile body out of his coarse male embrace like a swimmer kicking free of an undulating underwater plant that was entangling her feet. Perhaps Mitzi went to bed with other men to sleep occasionally in less inhospitable rooms than his, or eat something other than potatoes, or smoke cigarettes less toxic than the ones she bought on the street from war veterans missing an arm or leg or half a face who rolled them with tobacco from the butts they picked up from the ground. Perhaps that was why she’d gone to bed with him, who found his hands full of enormous bills worth millions of marks each time he changed a few francs of his paltry Spanish scholarship. Hunger exaggerated the collective hallucination and heightened the brilliance of bright nocturnal lights and the cascades of pearl necklaces on women who descended from black cars as long as gondolas at the doors of luxury restaurants. There was a sexual palpitation in the air that corresponded to a kind of perpetual rutting that drove him, when he was alone, to wander the streets where there were cabarets and brothels from which came bursts of syncopated music and splashes of light in strong colors, reds, greens, blues sometimes blurred by fog. Women with platinum hair and long legs, bare in spite of the cold, turned out to be men with shadowy chins and deep voices when he passed close to them, looking away and ignoring their invitations. At two or three in the morning he’d rap his knuckles on the little window of the basement where she lived, caress and open her in the darkness, and never know whether she was completely awake or moaned and murmured and laughed in her dreams as she held his waist with thin, supple thighs. Then he’d lie next to her, oppressed by stupefaction at himself and his own fury, now placated, with its share of Catholic remorse. But other times he looked for her and couldn’t find her, or, even worse, saw light in the dirty window and knocked but obtained no reply, and what became physically intolerable was the certainty that she was in bed at that moment with another man, the two of them lying there in silence, looking at the shadow on the glass, she placing her index finger on her painted lips, mockery on her face. In ten years Ignacio Abel hadn’t felt anything resembling that physical upheaval and hadn’t forgotten any of its details. He told no one of his adventure; he always stayed silent in men’s conversations about sex. But several years after his return from Germany, he saw his own derangement in a film of Buñuel’s shown privately in a small room at the Lyceum Club, not without great embarrassment on the part of the ladies. In the film a young woman, whom he found easy to confuse with his transient Hungarian lover, voluptuously sucked the foot of a marble statue; the two Buñuel lovers looked for each other, and when they found each other were separated again and harassed again and desired each other so much they dropped to the ground, embracing, not noticing the scandal they caused around them. He returned to Madrid early in the summer of 1924, and things and people seemed at a standstill, exactly where he had left them a year earlier. Even his former spirit was waiting for him, like a suit from several seasons ago hanging in a closet. He realized, like someone coming out of a drunken binge, that in Germany he’d sunk feverishly into a collective state of delusion and vigilance. As soon as he crossed the Spanish border, presenting his passport to Civil Guards with the surly faces of the poor under their three-cornered hats, and climbed into a train, excessive stimulation turned into dejection. He found strength only in the suitcase filled with books and magazines he’d dragged like a stone through the stations of Europe; they’d be nourishment for his mind in the years of intellectual penury that were approaching. In Madrid it was as hot as a desert and the streets in the city’s center were filled with the slow, baroque Corpus Christi procession: canons in heavy capes raising crosses and swinging ornate silver censers; women in black mantillas, with African down on their fleshy lips (among them his own mother-in-law, Doña Cecilia, and the unmarried sisters of his father-in-law, Don Francisco de Asís); soldiers in full-dress uniforms presenting arms to the Holy Sacrament. He went into his house and the air had the dense smell of the muscle ointment Adela’s father used and the garlic soup he enjoyed when he came over during her husband’s absence. Miguel, his face red, cried constantly, and Adela listed the symptoms of a possible intestinal infection, as if Ignacio Abel or his absence were responsible for it. The girl, four years old now, was frightened and threw herself into her mother’s arms when she saw the tall stranger who left two enormous suitcases in the entrance and came down the hall reaching for her, his big arms spread wide.

After so much time he was still searching as he had then, hoping for something he couldn’t name but that corroded or undermined his stability of thought, not allowing him real rest, injecting doubt and suspicion into the evident satisfaction of everything he’d achieved. In some German or French magazines he’d sometimes see photographs by his lover of so many years ago, signed with a short, clear pseudonym. Very calmly he pondered the asymmetry of memory: what had mattered so much to him was probably nothing to her. Time had erased his resentment and male suspicion of ridicule, leaving him with secret gratitude. He continued searching because of a youthful habit of his spirit transformed now into a character trait, separate from the expectations of his real life, which had flattened as it became more solid, stripped of risk and also of surprise, like a project that acquires a firm, useful presence when it materializes and at the same time loses the originality and beauty that were such powerful possibilities at the start, when it was no more than a sketch, a play of lines in a notebook, or not even that: the lightning flash of an intuition, the vacant space where foundations will not be dug for a long time to come. Somehow what was accomplished was frustrated, the work finished but omitting the best of what might have been. Perhaps the cutting edge of his intelligence had dulled, just as his sight was weaker and his movements clumsier, his body heavier and blunter, not pierced for so long by the stab of true desire. The tension of expectation remained unchanged, but it was likely that what awaited him in the future would not be much more than what had happened to him in the past. He wouldn’t feel again the suspense of the unknown, the feeling of unlimited possibility he’d had during the time he spent in Germany, so luminous and brief in memory. He had put his talent and ambition into his work and tended to his personal life distractedly, like someone who delegates to others the subordinate details of a complex assignment. Moving up with almost no one’s help — with only his enterprising illiterate mother, his prematurely dead father, and the decision his father never expressed but arranged for efficiently and in secret: his son would have a future less harsh than his — studying first for the bachelor’s degree and then the diploma in architecture, living with a kind of fanatical asceticism, had required so great a degree of concentration and energy that by comparison the rest of his life seemed a long period of idleness. Once he’d achieved the diploma and obtained his first position, constantly doing what was required or expected of him had demanded no more effort than allowing himself to be carried along with a certain strategic cleverness in the general direction of respectability. Perhaps, when the two of them were young, he’d been fonder of Adela than he remembered now. Their engagement, marriage, children, a girl and then a boy, had followed one another at decent intervals. With a combination of calculation and private irritation he’d complied with the norms of Adela’s family — attended his children’s baptisms, confirmations, and laying on of scapulars, languished through countless family celebrations, weddings and saints’ days and Christmas and New Year’s dinners, adopting a well-bred and increasingly absent air that everyone accepted as proof of his oddity, perhaps his talent, and maybe as a remnant of the indelicacy typical of his plebeian origins, to which no one alluded but no one forgot. In spite of his being the son of a woman who worked as a porter on Calle Toledo and a mason who’d done well, they were magnanimous enough to accept him as one of their own; they’d presented him with the most distinguished (though somewhat frayed) daughter of their irreproachable family and facilitated his access to the first rungs of a profession to which he otherwise could not have aspired no matter how many academic honors and diplomas in architecture he might have. They expected him to fulfill his responsibilities, to pay in regular installments and for the rest of his life the formidable interest on his debt: dignified behavior, observable conjugal ardor, rapid fatherhood, a profitable and brilliant display of his abilities, in principle only theoretical, by virtue of which he’d been accepted without too many reservations into a class that wasn’t his.

For years he performed the role so literally and with no detectable effort that he almost forgot another life might have been possible. Deception and conformity quickly became stable traits of his spirit, along with a profound indifference toward everything that wasn’t the solitary intellectual exaltation his work afforded him. Tedium without histrionics, sex without desire, and a shared and excessive concern for the children sustained his conjugal life. Unthinkingly, he imagined that his self-involvement and impassivity, gradually transformed into indifference, didn’t trouble Adela, that she even accepted them with relief, for she was a woman who always seemed insecure about and rather ashamed of her body, convinced it was typical of men to leave home early and return late and occupy the intervening time with incomprehensible tasks whose only result worthy of interest was the family’s welfare. The idea of patronizing prostitutes would have offended him even if he’d been able to ignore the undeniable hygienic arguments against it, which to his surprise didn’t faze other men. What he’d experienced in a room in Weimar with a young, determined, naked woman who shivered and embraced him and looked smilingly into his eyes as he moved rhythmically on top of her, adapting his thrusts to the knowing undulation of her hips — that wasn’t going to happen to him again, in the same irrevocable way he wouldn’t relive his youth. He looked attentively at all women but rarely felt deeply attracted by one or turned to continue looking at her after she passed. He supposed age was dampening his physical desire as much as his ambitions and the wildness of his imagination. He’d liked an American stranger a great deal for a few minutes and they exchanged a few words, and he’d been satisfied to think about her in the darkness of a taxi while Adela sat beside him and spoke with a hostile tone in her voice, as if she’d guessed, as if she’d been capable of catching in her husband’s eyes an instantaneous flash that hadn’t animated them in many years, just as Lita had noticed the foreigner’s narrow skirt and haircut and accent when she spoke Spanish, so different from Señorita Rossman’s severe Germanic consonants. He thought about her again as he lay in silence next to his wife that night, forcing himself to fix in his memory the details of her face — the freckles around her nose, the gleam of her eyes behind a lock of curly hair, which he’d been madly tempted to brush aside with his fingers — at the same time noting an indubitable beginning of physical excitement that soon languished, a flame fed by the very weak materials of his adult imagination. The following day, in his office at University City — on his desk was a newspaper with a review of his talk and a dark photo in which his face could hardly be seen — he asked to be connected to Moreno Villa’s telephone while he thought of the pretext for a conversation that would veer easily toward Judith Biely. But he hung up immediately, indecisive, cutting off the operator, unaccustomed to those kinds of tricks, and he didn’t have the opportunity to repeat the call or carry out a vague intention to invent an excuse for returning to the Residence in the childish hope he’d run into her.

The days go by and the possibility of something that was about to occur dissolves like a drawing traced in one’s breath on glass. Ignacio Abel might never have seen Judith Biely a second time and neither would have thought of the other again as they moved into the labyrinths of their own lives. Now he was walking along a corridor on the tenth floor of a new building on the Gran Vía — dark suit, double-breasted jacket, hat in hand, gray hair flat against his temples, the distracted, energetic appearance of someone who at heart doesn’t fear very much or expect too much, except for what’s appropriate. Surrounded by the predictable sounds of footsteps, secretaries’ clicking heels, bursts of announcements on radios, ringing telephones, the clatter of typewriters behind frosted-glass doors, he could distinguish more clearly the music he’d begun to hear when he left the elevator. The song reminded him of Judith Biely even before he knew it was guiding him to her. He remembered her first name but not her second — the sunlight coming in through the large window facing west as she turned her head without interrupting the melody she was playing on the piano, Negrín saying that her last name was or sounded Russian. The silent elevator had opened on a wide expanse of polished floor and a wall of glass bricks that diffused the light from a large interior courtyard. The elevator operator touched his cap and stepped aside to let him pass. It smelled promisingly new, just completed, with odors of recent varnish, fresh paint, and wood. Even footsteps had the resonance of a space not yet completely occupied, its bare walls returning echoes and accentuating sharp sounds.

The music came from the other side of one of the numbered doors along the corridor where Ignacio Abel was looking for the nameplate of the person who’d made an appointment with him, the effusive voice with a strong Mexican accent that called him on the phone two or three days after his lecture. “You don’t know who I am, but I know a great deal about you,” the voice said. “I know and admire your work. We have mutual friends. Dr. Negrín was kind enough to give me your number.” Ignacio Abel accepted out of curiosity, yielding to flattery, and because that Friday afternoon he was going to be alone in Madrid. Adela and the children had left for the house in the Sierra in preparation for one of the great yearly family celebrations, the saint’s day of her father, Don Francisco de Asís. He imagined the appointment would be in an office. There were many in the building, the headquarters of foreign businesses, film producers and distributors, travel agencies, and steamship companies. The typewriters and telephones sounded in gusts, as when a door is opened and closed and the sound of the rain comes in. Young secretaries passed him, wearing makeup and moving fast like the ones he’d seen ten years earlier in Germany: uniformed pages, telegram deliverymen, clerks with briefcases under their arms, workers putting the finishing touches on installations. The activity pleased him, the suggestion of urgent tasks, so different from the lethargic calm of the ministerial offices where he sometimes had to go to take care of matters related to the construction at University City: records of payments that were never resolved, transactions that ground to a halt because a signature was missing, or a certificate, or the purple oval of a stamp, or medieval red sealing wax at the bottom of a document. On the outside this building, like so many recent ones in Madrid, had a noble mass but was complicated and affected, with columns and cornices that held up nothing and stone balconies where no one would ever stand, plaster filigrees whose only purpose would be to immediately collect pigeon droppings and soot from chimneys and cars. The interiors, however, were diaphanous, right angles and clean curves, arithmetical sequences that unfolded before him as he walked along the corridor and approached the door from which the music came; it wasn’t frosted glass and didn’t have a commercial sign but a discreet plaque with a name written in cursive script: P. W. Van Doren.

He recognized the song at the same time he recalled her musical and forgotten last name: Biely. And a moment later, when the door opened, he saw her, with no prior warning, as if her presence had been an emanation of the music and her suddenly remembered name. Instead of an office he found himself in the middle of what seemed to be a party, somewhat incongruous at that early hour, still part of the working day. He had the feeling that when he crossed the threshold he was entering a space not continuous with the corridor that brought him there; it didn’t seem Spanish, didn’t seem completely real: a large living room with white walls and abstract masses, like an interior in a modern film. The people, the guests, looked like extras, arranged in small groups and conversing in several languages and on different planes, as if to occupy the set in a convincing way. Unexpected, recognized, carnal among those figures who didn’t notice the presence of the new arrival — not because they intended to act as if they didn’t see him, but because they moved on another plane of reality — Judith saw him as soon as he came in and from a distance made a gesture of welcome. She held a gleaming record in her hands and stood next to the gramophone, lost as well among strangers though he didn’t realize it at the time, in front of a large window overlooking a provincial Madrid of tile roofs and bell towers and church domes, keeping the rhythm of the song with nods of her head. The clarinet, the piano, Benny Goodman accompanying Teddy Wilson on a disk recorded in New York only a few months earlier, discovered by her with a rush of nostalgia in the listening booth of a music store in Paris at the beginning of the summer, when she didn’t yet know she would travel to Madrid in September, when Spain for her was still the place dreamed about in books, a country as illusory and anchored in her youthful imagination as Treasure Island or Sancho Panza’s Ínsula Barataria. The maid in the black uniform and white cap who opened the door moved away discreetly, carrying Ignacio Abel’s hat and umbrella. His quick, expert glance simultaneously assessed the dimensions of the space and the quality and disposition of the objects, identifying the creators of the paintings and furniture, almost all German or French of the past ten years except for a distinguished Viennese or two from the beginning of the century. Everything had the attractiveness of excessive premeditation, of calculated disorder, with a shine like that of photographic paper or an international design magazine. A young waiter, his hair lacquered with pomade, offered him a glass of transparent liquid that smelled of iced gin, a small tray with canapés of fresh butter and caviar. Judith seemed to take a long time to reach him through groups of people who separated without seeing her to let her pass or whom she skirted, guided only by the melody she’d played tentatively on the piano in the Residence. The closer she came, the more real and exciting she was, dressed in a plain white blouse and wide trousers. Then she shook his hand with masculine assurance. Her warm hand, with slim fingers and fragile bones when he pressed it slightly, caught in his for a moment that was prolonged without either one doing anything about it, not knowing anything about the other and alone again in the sound made by invisible people, just as they’d been a few nights earlier at the Residence. When she looked at him, Ignacio Abel became uncomfortably aware of his own appearance, too severe and too Spanish in that environment, among people younger than he and, like Judith, dressed in sports clothes — close-fitting sweaters, bright ties, checked trousers, two-toned shoes. Occasionally a laugh or an American exclamation rose above the conversations and the clink of glasses.

“The man who doesn’t like bullfights,” said Judith. “I’m so happy to see you again, among so many strangers.”

“I thought they were all compatriots of yours.”

“But in my country I wouldn’t have known any of them.”

“One isn’t the same away from one’s country.”

“What are you like when you’re away from Spain?” Judith looked at him over the glass she held to her lips.

“I almost don’t remember. I haven’t traveled for a long time.”

“You say that sadly. Your face lit up when you showed photographs of modern German buildings in your talk.”

“I hope you weren’t too bored.” Alcohol, which he wasn’t accustomed to drinking, caused a warm surge in his chest each time he took a sip. The smell of gin mixed with the scent of Judith’s cologne or soap. The physical desire her closeness provoked was as new and as immediate for him as the alcohol in his blood, and it produced a comparable bewilderment. He was waking after more than ten years, astonished at having been asleep for so long.

“Now you’re fishing for compliments.” Judith had moved instinctively to English and began to laugh at her own linguistic confusion: she wiped her lips with a small napkin, sorry now for her laughter and perhaps her remark. “You know very well no one was bored.”

He liked her even more than he remembered. He hadn’t known how to keep in his memory the exact color of her eyes, the brightness of her ironic and alert intelligence, the way her thick, curly hair was cut at a right angle at her cheeks, the luminous timbre of her voice in Spanish. Enthusiasm made her beautiful. She’d been in Madrid for a month and felt all the ardor of an unexpected love affair with the city. She was one of those people able to take pleasure in everything, to be grateful for the new with no shadow of mistrust toward the unknown. Talking to her that afternoon, Ignacio Abel thought she resembled Lita in her balance between a rigorous vocation for learning and a good-natured aptitude for receiving the gifts of the unforeseen, for serenely enjoying life. She’d spent two years traveling in Europe and planned to leave a six-month stay in Spain for the end. But a former classmate from Columbia University, where Judith had abandoned her doctoral studies a few years earlier, called at the beginning of the summer: she was ill and couldn’t take charge of the group of students whom she had to accompany during a semester of exchange studies in Madrid. So many pieces of chance required to weave a decisive moment in life. Since the beginning of September, and contrary to all her recent expectations, Judith Biely was a teacher living in a pensión in Madrid, in an austere, bright room overlooking the Plaza de Santa Ana, while she waited for a room to become available at the Residence for Young Ladies. She was perfecting her Spanish, which she had begun to study on her own as a child after reading a student edition of Tales of the Alhambra; she attended classes in literature at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters and in Spanish history at the Center for Historical Studies on Calle Almagro, and went to lectures and concerts and film screenings at the Student Residence; she ate delicious, indigestible stews in the taverns along Cava Baja; she strolled at dusk along Vistillas and the Viaducto and the Plaza de Oriente to watch the sunsets that in this inland city took on the delicate breadth of ocean horizons sieved with mist. The purples and grays of the Sierra seen through her window on the first rainy days of October she recognized a short time later in the backgrounds of Velázquez’s hunting scenes. The joy of leaving her pensión and spending a morning in the museum was not very different from the pleasure afterward of having a sandwich of fried squid and a glass of beer at a stand on the Paseo del Prado, watching the talkative, active people of Madrid walk by, attempting to decipher their turns of phrase, reviewing in a small notebook the new words and expressions she was learning. When she was ten or twelve years old and her family lived in Brooklyn she read Washington Irving, bent for hours over a table in a public library, looking at illustrations in which the Alhambra was an Oriental palace, sitting by a window through which she could see courtyards covered with clotheslines of sheets in a neighborhood of Italian and Jewish immigrants; now she was impatient to take an express train one night and wake up in Granada. A little before enrolling at City College she discovered a book of travels through Spain by John Dos Passos, Rosinante to the Road Again, and now she carried it with her and at times reread it in the very places described in its pages. Thanks to Dos Passos she’d learned about Cervantes and El Greco, but in the Prado was moved much more by Velázquez and Goya. Had she seen Goya’s frescoes in the dome of San Antonio de la Florida, his less famous but equally powerful canvases in the Academia de San Fernando, his several series of etchings? Ignacio Abel surprised himself by offering to act as guide. They were very near San Fernando, and they could reach the hermitage of San Antonio in just a few minutes by car: you crossed the river, and the landscape of the Pradera, with the city in the background and the great white smudge of the Palacio de Oriente, was the same one Goya painted. His own boldness disconcerted him: it would in no way be difficult to put out his hand and touch her face, so close, to move away the lock of hair that brushed the corner of her smiling mouth. Judith nodded, very attentive in order to understand each word, her thin lips moistened by her drink, her eyes shining, or was it simply the euphoric effect of alcohol and conversation in a foreign language, the same boldness that was urging him on, irresponsible, a little dizzy, insisting that his car was nearby, and besides, because of his work, he knew the chaplain at the hermitage, who would allow them to climb up to the dome to see the frescoes more closely. He was not in love yet and already he was jealous of others who might touch her, other men joined to her by the complicity of language. A husky man with a shaved head embraced her from behind.

“Judith, my dear, would you please introduce me to my own guest?”

How did he know her, for how long? Why did he rest his square chin on her shoulder and brush her hair with his lips with no awkwardness and put his arms around her waist, his two large, thick hands with black hairs (but pink, glossy manicured nails) closing just above her trousers? She made a gesture of detaching herself but without much conviction, perhaps somewhat uncomfortable though not enough to move her face away, to separate the hands that pressed her against the male body adhering to her back. How would it feel to be in his place, pressing that slim body, feeling the rhythm of her breathing beneath the fabric of her blouse? He was surprised by this confusion of sudden emotions, as impervious to the control of his will as the beating of his heart or the rapid surges of pressure at his temples.

“Phil Van Doren,” said Judith, looking at Ignacio Abel as if begging his pardon. “Philip Van Doren the Third, to give his complete name.”

“I couldn’t attend your lecture the other day, but I read about it in several newspapers, and Judith gave me all the details.”

I would have liked to separate those two hands that touched you so confidently, with their black hairs and rings and polished nails, make him move away from you and not put his mouth so close to yours, and not keep brushing against you with that proprietary air he had toward everything, his house, his guests, even me, who didn’t even know why he’d called me and didn’t care, it was enough to have found you again.

“As I told you on the phone, I’ve made some inquiries about you. I’ve seen some of your work in Madrid.” Van Doren spoke excellent Spanish, with a Mexican accent. “The public school in that southern neighborhood, the Marketplace. Magnificent works, if you’ll permit the opinion of an amateur.”

He pronounced amateur in perfect French. He had light eyes and a penetrating gaze that could easily turn suspicious or sarcastic, and he depilated his eyebrows as carefully as he shaved his skull. No matter how sharp his razor, it would never mitigate the black shadow of his beard. From a turtleneck sweater that emphasized his pectoral muscles emerged the tanned, powerful head of an athlete. Ignacio Abel immediately felt relief tinged with discomfort: in those solidly masculine hands embracing Judith there was probably no desire, but his gaze had the excessive fixity of someone prepared to make quick, irrevocable judgments regarding whoever was in front of him, subjecting that person to tests for which he was the only judge; a brazen, covetous, indiscriminate, incautious curiosity, an instinct for discovering what was most hidden and learning what no one else knew.

“Things never turn out as one would like,” said Abel, flattered, especially because Judith was there, and unaccustomed to praise. “There’s always a lack of money, and delays, and you have to fight with everybody. Not to mention the strikes, the ones that are justified and the ones that are not…”

But once he was no longer the person speaking, Van Doren became instantly distracted. He looked at the guests, the waiters, attentive to every detail, making abrupt movements with his head as if constantly adjusting the angle and distance of vision. He nodded a great deal, he greeted someone briefly, he looked toward the large windows as if the brightness of the day or the condition of the atmosphere also depended on him. He asked Ignacio Abel to accompany him to his study. When he’d taken him by the arm to lead him there, he seemed to remember Judith, signaled her to join them, and put his arm around her waist, affectionate again, noticing her glass was almost empty, ordering a waiter with an authoritative gesture to give her another, his face animated by a wide smile one moment and very serious the next, frowning in anger. Ignacio Abel allowed himself to be carried along. The hand leading him was as strong as his sexual desire, and the gin he drank unexpectedly weakened his self-control. He was confused by the strangeness of the place, the bubble of space he’d entered when the maid opened the door and he saw Judith in the back of the room, gesturing as if she had been expecting him all along; she knew he’d come; somehow it was part of a purpose that involved him without his knowledge; she was going to change the record on the gramophone and turned when she heard the doorbell over the music and the guests’ voices.

Van Doren closed his door more energetically than necessary, and when he sat across from them in a tubular easy chair covered in calfskin and placed his hands on his knees, he had the serenity of a dancer who has completed a leap without visible effort. Resting on the sporty fabric of his trousers, his hands stood out with obscene crudeness. The sound of the party was faint, intensifying in Ignacio Abel the sensation of distance, of losing his footing, of advancing in the darkness along a passage, extending his hands and not finding a solid point of reference to define the space. The close-fitting sleeves of Van Doren’s sweater revealed a portion of his muscular, hairy forearms. The watch on his left wrist and the bracelet on his right were gold, and both shook when he moved his hands. The pale light of the October afternoon shone on her hair and the taut skin of her cheeks and chin. Van Doren had rung a bell when he observed Judith lighting a cigarette and followed with his eyes the hand that left the burned match on the glass tabletop. The waiter came in, and Van Doren signaled to him to bring an ashtray, always in a hurry and with a touch of rage that his smile couldn’t conceal, not because he didn’t know how but because he didn’t try. Perhaps what he didn’t know was how to live without the sensation of frightening whoever was near him. The waiter changed Ignacio Abel’s unfinished, by now warm glass for another in which the cold left a cloud of condensation on its delicate, inverted-cone shape. Judith tasted hers in short sips, like her puffs on the cigarette, which she kept far from her face.

“Modern architecture is my passion,” said Van Doren. “Painting, too, as you may have noticed, but in another way. Do you like Paul Klee?”

That vigilant stare had followed his, incredulous, overwhelmed by five small canvases by Paul Klee, watercolors and oils, and not far from them a drawing of a still life, probably by Juan Gris.

“Klee was my drawing professor in Germany.”

“You studied at the Bauhaus?” Now Van Doren granted him the consideration that until then, for one reason or another, out of mistrust or simple arrogance, he’d only feigned.

“One year, during the early period, in Weimar. I learned more in a few months than I had in my entire life.”

But Van Doren had already lost interest. Still smiling, he was elsewhere, like someone who closes his eyes for a second, is asleep, and wakes with a start. He contracted his facial muscles and in an instant picked up the interrupted thread of his monologue.

“But painting is a private pleasure, even when it’s enjoyed in a museum. You’re alone before the canvas, and the world around you no longer exists. Painting demands a degree of contemplation that at times is a problem for active people. When you’re still for a few minutes, don’t you regret it, feel you’re losing something? Of course a building can be enjoyed as privately as a painting. As you know, the esthetic emotion tends to be reinforced by the privilege of possession. But architecture always has a public part, accessible to anyone, on the street, outdoors. It’s an affirmation. Like a fist coming down on a table…”

Van Doren made a fist with his right hand and held it up, pushing up the sleeves of his sweater almost to the elbow.

“Look at that magnificent Telephone Company tower. Perhaps Judith has told you we own shares in it. My family, I mean, through American Telephone and Telegraph. The tower is a statement — the power of money, our dear Judith, who has radical sympathies as you know, would say. And she’s correct, of course she is, but there’s also something else. The marvel of telephone communications, and better still, radio waves that don’t require the laying of cables to transmit words through the atmosphere, making them resonate like echoes in the stratosphere, then retrieving them. A miracle for people our parents’ age, an act of witchcraft. But that tower is saying something else as well, and you as an architect are aware of what it means: the drive of your country, as powerful now as when the cathedrals were built. You approach Madrid and the Telephone Company Building is its cathedral. A tower of offices and a warehouse filled with machinery and cables, a symbol too, just like a church or a Greek temple or a pyramid.”

He took a final sip of his drink, clicking his tongue, and looked sideways at his watch. Ignacio Abel studied the somewhat absent face of Judith, whose eyes were fixed on her cigarette smoke. Perhaps their mutual excitement had dissipated. Perhaps when the effect of alcohol and physical proximity had passed, neither would feel anything for the other.

“But I see you’re impatient. I don’t want to waste your time or mine. I haven’t forgotten that you’re not a contemplative soul either. I suppose you haven’t heard of Burton College. It’s a small school, very select, about two hours by train north of New York, on the Hudson River. Beautiful country. The campus is in the middle of a natural landscape, the houses and farms of the early colonists surround it—”

“And before that, those of the Indians expelled by the early colonists,” said Judith.

Van Doren looked at her with absolute serenity, examining her slowly, then looking at Ignacio Abel as if to make certain he’d witnessed his magnanimity. It pleased him to give the impression that some kind of familiarity existed between Judith and him.

“It was inevitable when we reached this point that our dear Judith would bring up the Indians. Sadly disappeared. You Spaniards know something about that. But if Judith permits, I’d prefer to go on with my story about Burton College. Right now the woods are turning red and yellow. I’m not sentimental, and I like Madrid a great deal, but I miss the autumn colors in that part of America. Judith knows what I’m referring to. Haven’t you ever been to the United States, Professor Abel? Perhaps the right moment is now. My family has been connected to Burton College for several generations. At one point, in fact, it was almost called Van Doren College. The land for the campus was a gift from a great-grandfather of mine. As you know, we settled there before the English arrived. We Dutch, I mean. Their New York was our New Amsterdam first, just as today’s Mexico was your New Spain—”

“That’s why that part of the state is filled with Dutch names,” Judith interrupted, perhaps with some annoyance at his display of ancestors, she whose only forebears in America were her parents, immigrants who spoke English with a terrible accent and argued in Russian and Yiddish.

“The Roosevelts, to name some prominent neighbors,” and Van Doren laughed. “Or the Vanderbilts. Or the Van Burens. Except in our family we’ve been more discreet. No politics, no speculative transactions. The last crisis barely affected us.”

“It affected us,” said Judith, but Van Doren decided to ignore her.

“Burton College has been the preferred area for our philanthropy. There’s a Van Doren Hall where symphonic concerts are given regularly, a Van Doren Wing in the hospital, specializing in pioneering treatments for cancer. And for years, since my father’s time, a project has existed that I love dearly because my father wanted to build it and died too soon: a new library, the Van Doren Library, the Philip Van Doren the Second Library, to be exact. Several architects have already done work for us, but I don’t like any of the proposals. Of course I’m not the one who decides, but what I say carries a good deal of weight with the board of trustees, and in the end, I’m the one who holds the purse strings.”

“The one who has the frying pan by the handle,” said Judith, happy to correct Van Doren for his literal translation from English with a straightforward Spanish expression she’d learned not long before and liked very much.

“So far everything they’ve presented to us has been a pastiche, as you can imagine.” Van Doren again pronounced a French word with mannered correctness. “Gothic pastiches, imitations of imitations, Greek temples, Roman baths, railroad stations, or exposition halls imitating Greek temples and Roman monuments, pastries in the Beaux-Arts style. But I don’t want that land profaned by a monstrosity that resembles a post office. I’d like you to see it. I’ll have photographs and plans sent to you. It’s a clearing in a forest of maples and oaks, high ground beyond the western edge of the campus, with a view of the Hudson. The building will be seen from the trains that run along the riverbank, from the ships that sail up and down the river. Even from the New Jersey side. It’ll be the most visible building of the college. I picture it above the treetops, more hidden when they’re full of leaves, at the end of a walk that will lead away from the central quadrangle, a secluded, elevated path to books, its lights on until midnight. There will be books but also records of any kind of music, from anywhere in the world. Judith, with her excellent ear, will undoubtedly help me find recordings of Spanish music. My family has shares in some gramophone companies. I imagine soundproof booths for listening to the records, projection rooms where anyone can watch films. I’m interested in the project you have now in Spain to record the voices of your most eminent personalities. There’ll be reading rooms with large windows offering views of the woods and the river, the other buildings on campus. Not one of those lugubrious libraries like the ones in England that are mindlessly imitated in America, with smells of mildew and crumbling leather, stacks and card catalogues of dark wood, like coffins or funerary monuments, low lamps with green shades that give faces the color of death. I see a bright library, like those buildings and shops your teachers built in Germany, like the school you built in Madrid. A library that’s practical, like a good gymnasium, a gymnasium for the mind. A watchtower and a refuge as well.”

“I want to work in that library,” said Judith, but Van Doren had no time to listen. He moved his large hands with their pink manicured nails and pushed up the sleeves of his sweater as if impatient to begin work on his imaginary library, to dig the foundation, level the uneven terrain, lay rows of red bricks or blocks carved from the gray stones found in the forest.

“I didn’t invite you here today for you to say yes, to make a commitment to me,” Van Doren said. “You have many things to do, and so do I. Dr. Negrín has told me that this year will be particularly difficult for all of you, because he promised to inaugurate University City next October. Difficult, if you’ll permit me. Almost impossible.”

“Have you visited the construction site?”

Before answering, Van Doren smiled to himself, like someone who hasn’t decided to reveal completely what he knows, or who wants to give the impression that he knows more than he does.

“That’s one of the reasons I came to Madrid in the first place. I’ve visited the site and consulted plans and models. A magnificent project, on a scale that has no equal in Europe, though its execution is slow and perhaps chaotic. I liked your building very much, of course, the one designed exclusively by you. The steam power plant, if I’m not mistaken.”

“It’s almost not a building. It’s a box for holding machinery and controls. It’s not operating yet. Who showed it to you?”

“Phil isn’t going to answer that question,” said Judith. Van Doren gave her a quick smile, a gesture, approving, not without flattery, what she’d said. He was a man who liked above all to know what others didn’t know and to have privileged access to what was unavailable to the rest. Ignacio Abel didn’t like Judith calling him “Phil” again.

“It’s a cubic block and yet looks as if it emerged from the earth, was part of the earth,” Van Doren said. “It’s a fortress but doesn’t seem to weigh too much, this vigorous heart that pumps hot water and heat to the city of knowledge. One wants to knock on that gate in the wall and enter the castle. One sees immediately that you’ve worked with competent engineers. And that aside from your German teachers, you must admire some Scandinavian architects, I would assume. Was it difficult to have your project accepted?”

“Not too bad. It’s a practical construction, so no one pays much attention to it. There was no need to add volutes or Plateresque eaves or to imitate El Escorial.”

“A terrible building, don’t you agree? Compatriots of yours who are very proud of it took me to see it last week. It was like entering a sinister set for Don Carlo. One feels the weight of the granite as if it were the hand of Philip the Second in an iron glove. Or perhaps the hand of the statue of the Commendatore in Don Giovanni.”

Van Doren burst into laughter, looking for Judith’s complicity, then turned to Abel, completely changing his tone.

“Are you a Communist?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Checking up on me,” Judith said quietly in English, visibly irritated. She stood and went to the window, uncomfortable because of what seemed to be the beginning of an interrogation for which she perhaps felt partially responsible.

“Some of your classmates and professors at the Bauhaus were. And I think you’re a man who likes to get things done. Who has practical sense and at the same time a utopian imagination.”

“Do you have to be a Communist for that?”

“Communist or Fascist, I’m afraid. You have to love big projects and immediate, effective action, and have no patience for empty talk, for delays. In Moscow or Berlin your University City would be finished by now. Even in Rome.”

“But probably it would make no sense.” Ignacio Abel was aware of Judith’s gaze and attention. “Unless it was like a barracks or a reeducation camp.”

“Don’t repeat propagandistic vulgarities that are unworthy of you. German science is the best in the world.”

“It won’t be for very long.”

“Now you’re talking like a Communist.”

“Are you saying you have to be a Communist to be against Hitler?” Judith Biely said. She was standing by the window, angry, serious, agitated. Van Doren looked at her, not responding. The one he stared at intently was Ignacio Abel, who spoke without raising his voice, with the instinctive diffidence he felt when he expressed political opinions.

“I’m a Socialist.”

“Is there any difference?”

“When the Communists came to power in Russia, they sent the Socialists to prison.”

“The Socialists shot Rosa Luxemburg in Germany in 1919,” Judith said. The discussion produced a somewhat histrionic comic effect in Van Doren.

“And when the Fascists or the Nazis win, Communists and Socialists will end up together in the same prisons, after having fought so much with one another. You cannot deny there’s a certain humor in that.”

“I hope that doesn’t happen in my country, and we’ll inaugurate University City on time with no need for a Fascist or Communist coup.” Ignacio Abel would have liked to end the conversation and leave, but if he left now, when would he see Judith again?

“I like your enthusiasm, Ignacio, if you’ll permit me to use your first name. I’ve heard you ended your lecture eloquently, with a revolutionary declaration. Judith didn’t tell me this, don’t blame her. I’d be delighted if you called me Phil and if we used informal address with each other, though I know we just met and Spain is a more formal place than America. I like it that you don’t seem to care about staying on the margins of the great modern currents, politically speaking.”

“They seem horribly primitive to me.”

“I visited the Soviet Union two years ago, and I’ve traveled extensively through Germany and Italy. I believe I’m a person without prejudices. An American open to the new things the world can offer. An innocent abroad, as Mark Twain, one of the great travelers of my country, put it. We’re a new nation compared to you Europeans. We feel sympathy for everything that’s a valiant break with the past. That’s how we were born, breaking with old Europe, putting an end to kings and archbishops.”

“We did that in Spain just four years ago.”

“And with what results? What have you brought to completion in this time? I drive through the country and once I leave Madrid I see only miserable villages. Skinny peasants on burros, goatherds, barefoot children, women sitting in the sun picking lice out of each other’s hair.”

“You’re exaggerating, Phil,” Judith said. “Señor Abel’s feelings may be hurt. You’re talking about his country.”

“About a part of it,” Ignacio Abel said quietly, furious with himself for not leaving, for continuing to listen.

“You waste your energy on parliamentary battles, on speeches, on changes of government. You say you’re a Socialist, but inside your own party you’re fighting! Are you a Socialist in favor of the parliamentary system or a participant in the uprising last year to bring the Soviet revolution to Spain? I had the pleasure of meeting your coreligionist Don Julián Besteiro last year at a diplomatic dinner, and he seemed a perfect gentleman, but I also thought he was living in the clouds. Forgive me for speaking frankly: part of my work entails looking for information. We have a good deal of money invested in your country and wouldn’t like to lose it. We want to know whether it’s advisable for us to continue working and investing money here, or would it be more prudent to leave. Is it true that new elections will be held soon? I arrived in Madrid last month and the papers were full of photographs of the new government. Now I’ve read that a crisis has been announced and the government will change. Look at what Germany has accomplished in the same time. Look at the highways, the expansion of industry, the millions of new jobs. And it isn’t a question of racial differences, of efficient Aryans and lazy Latins, as some people believe. Look at what Italy has become in ten years. Have you seen the highways, the new railroad stations, the strength of the army? I also don’t have ideological prejudices, my dear Judith — it’s simply a practical question. In the same way I admire the formidable advances of the Soviet five-year plans. I’ve seen the factories with my own eyes, the blast furnaces, the collective farms plowed with tractors. Ten, fifteen years ago, the countryside was more miserable and backward in Russia than in Spain. Just two years ago Germany was a humiliated nation. Now once again it’s the leading power in Europe. In spite of the terrible, unjust sanctions the Allies imposed on it, especially the French, who wouldn’t be so resented if they were not also incompetent and corrupt—”

“And the price doesn’t matter?”

“Don’t the democracies pay a horrifying price as well? Millions of men without work in my country, in England, in France. The breakdown of the Third Republic. Children with swollen bellies and eyes covered with flies right here on the outskirts of Madrid. Even our president has had to imitate the gigantic public works projects of Germany and Italy, the planning of the Soviet government.”

“I hope he doesn’t also imitate the prison camps.”

“Or the racial laws.”

“Dear Judith, in that regard I’m afraid you have an insurmountable prejudice.”

It took Ignacio Abel a moment to understand what they were saying. He observed that Judith Biely had turned red, and that Van Doren was enjoying his own cold vehemence, the sense that he was controlling the conversation. He wasn’t accustomed to the North American ease in combining courtesy with crudeness.

“Do you mean I despise Hitler because I’m a Jew?”

“I mean that things have to be considered in their exact proportions. I don’t have prejudices, as you well know. If you wanted to leave the position you have now in a university that in my opinion is mediocre, I would recommend immediately that you be offered a contract at Burton College. How many Jews were there in Germany two years ago? Five hundred thousand? How many of them will have to leave? And if there’s no place for all of them in Germany, why don’t their coreligionists and friends in France, England, or the United States rush to take them in? How many Russian aristocrats and parasites had to leave the country, voluntarily or by force, when the Soviet Union began to be created in earnest? And the Spaniards, didn’t they burn churches and expel the Jesuits when they started out? How many Germans found themselves forced to leave the land where they were born so that Beneš and Masaryk could have their beloved Czech homeland complete? In America, we also expelled thousands of Britons, a great many colonists who were as American as Washington or Jefferson but preferred to continue as subjects of the English crown. It’s a question of proportion, my dear, not individual cases. As we say in our country, there’s no free lunch. Everything has a price.”

Van Doren had been glancing sideways at his watch as he spoke. He inspected in dry flashes of attention everything that happened around him, what he could deduce from the gaze, the gestures, the silence of his interlocutor. There was a suggestion of imposture in his conviction, as if he were capable of defending with the same intensity the opposite of what he was saying, laying a trap to find out their hidden thoughts. The servant in the short jacket and carrying a tray came in silently and leaned over to whisper in his ear. Ignacio Abel suspected he came in at a prearranged hour to interrupt a meeting that shouldn’t be prolonged. In Judith’s eyes he saw a complicity that hadn’t existed when they entered the room: something that had been said there placed them on the same side. Her sharing with him something that excluded Van Doren not only flattered him, it produced an intense sexual desire, as if they’d dared an unexpected physical closeness that no one else saw. Van Doren looked at his watch again and spoke to the servant, detached from what was happening between them. Or perhaps not — nothing escaped his cynicism or his astuteness, his habit of controlling, subtly or rudely, the lives of others.

“You don’t know how sorry I am, but I have to leave. An unexpected appointment at the Ministry of Information. The question is whether the minister will still be minister when I get there… Seriously, my dear Ignacio, I’m sorry we talked about politics. It’s always a waste of time, especially when there are more serious things to be discussed. Judith, how do you say to make a long story short in Spanish?”

“Ir al grano. To get right to the point.”

“An admirable woman. To get right to the point, Ignacio, I’m authorized to offer you a position as visiting professor in the Department of Fine Arts and Architecture at Burton College next year, the fall semester if that’s convenient, and if University City is inaugurated on time, which I hope with all my heart. And during that time I’d like you to study the possibility of designing the new library, the Van Doren Library. The project will have to be approved by the board, of course, but I can guarantee you’ll be able to work with absolute freedom. You’re a man of the future, and if the future, by your calculation, doesn’t belong to Germany or Russia, perhaps the best thing for you is the future in America. Now I have to go, if you’ll both forgive me. Make yourselves at home. This is your house. I’ll be waiting for your reply, my dear Ignacio. À bientôt, my dear Judith.”

Van Doren stood, extended his arms, and with no effort put on the sports jacket the servant held for him. In the sharp, acute look of his eyes, in the movement of his depilated eyebrows, was a quick suggestion of obscenity, as if offering to Judith Biely and Ignacio Abel the room he was about to leave, as if he’d already guessed and taken as certain what they themselves still didn’t dare to think.