In the Night of Time

8

HE DOES NOTHING, he only waits, letting the train carry him. He waits and is afraid, but most of all he abandons himself to the momentum of the train, the inertia of being carried and not deciding, leaning back against the worn upholstery, his face turned to the window, his hat on his lap, his hands on his knees, his entire body registering the rhythmic bump of the wheels on the rails, the abruptness of a curve. This was how he spent six days on the ship that crossed the Atlantic, absolved of all obligation and all uncertainty for the first time in who knows how long, from the moment he saw with relief how the coast of France was disappearing and before the uneasiness about his arrival in America began, six days of not showing documents or responding to lists of questions, without the torment of having to decide anything, the past and the future as clear and empty as the ocean’s horizon, lying on a hammock on deck feeling all the weariness stored up in his body, a weariness much deeper than he’d imagined, in the weight of his eyelids, his arms and hands, his feet swollen after whole nights on trains when he couldn’t remove his shoes, his body exhausted inert matter demanding its own immobility after hurrying so much from one place to another.

He thinks of a convalescent opening her eyes as she emerges from unconsciousness or anesthesia, and turning her head that rested on a pillow toward the window of the hospital room; the image becomes more precise and it’s Adela. Beyond the window is a landscape of dark groves of pine and oak, flecked by the large white flowers of rockrose. The window is partially open, and a soft breeze scented with rockrose and resin enters and gently brushes a gray lock of hair off her pale face. He doesn’t know if the gray strands have just come out or if she’s been careless about dyeing her hair; maybe the color has faded because of her immersion in water where she almost drowned. He looks at her and knows nothing about her. She’s his wife, he’s lived with her almost every day for the past sixteen years, and she’s as unfamiliar and anonymous as the sanatorium room or the bed with white bars she’s lying in. Farther away, toward a Madrid barely silhouetted in the distance, the air has a chalky light that vibrates in a fog of suffocating heat. When he came in, Ignacio Abel closed the door, took a few steps toward the bed, but remained standing, his hat in one hand, in the other the small bouquet of flowers he hasn’t yet resolved to give her, perhaps because he doesn’t know how. How do you give flowers to a woman who didn’t move at all when she saw him come in but simply looked at him for a moment and then turned her eyes back to the window, both arms next to her body, on top of the cover, her hands doing nothing to take the flowers. You stood next to the door as if you were making an obligatory call. You didn’t even come to put your arms around me and say you were glad I was all right. Who knows if maybe you would have preferred that they hadn’t saved me. You would be rid of the obstacle. Leaning against the window, noting the vibration of the glass against his forehead, he doesn’t know whether what he remembers is Adela’s voice that day in June or lines from the letter he carries in his pocket and should have torn up. Maybe he’s projecting onto her silent image the written words he imagined in her voice, the ones Adela wanted to say to him that day but didn’t, or the ones she murmured in the half-sleep of her fever and then, without relief or consolation, wrote down much later, when the outbreak of the war had already separated them like a great geological fault, he in Madrid and she in the Sierra house with the children and her parents, back inside that familial cocoon where she felt so protected and perhaps should never have left, except that then she wouldn’t have had those two children who’d welcomed her with such sweetness when she came home after a week in the hospital, not asking questions about what everyone in the family was calling “the accident,” filling her with remorse for what she’d attempted. If there is anything I regret, it’s not having thought about them when I was blinded by my desire to hurt you. They are the ones who would have really suffered. Not you. You would have been spared my presence. Your path would have been cleared. And yet, deep down I didn’t want to hurt you, fool that I am. I was simply mad with love and couldn’t bear the thought of you leaving me. It’s not really her voice, they’re words written in a kind of long, unrelenting paroxysm, perhaps on a sleepless night, by the light of an oil lamp, possibly hearing like the muffled noise of a storm the shelling at the front that couldn’t have been very far away. The children sleeping, Don Francisco de Asís and Doña Cecilia snoring in their room, the village with all its lights out, perhaps a small lantern in the narrow window of a barn, the railroad station dark, no trains going back and forth to Madrid for over a month, not since the day in July when Ignacio Abel left as he would have done on any other Sunday afternoon that summer, like so many men who leave their families in the Sierra and return to the city to work, in his light suit, holding his briefcase, waving goodbye with his hat on the other side of the gate. You must have thought I didn’t notice your impatience when you wanted to leave. You didn’t dare say so because you promised the children you’d stay until early Monday morning but I knew you wouldn’t be able to stand it. What called you was so strong you didn’t care about the news from Morocco and Sevilla and the danger in Madrid with so much gunfire and horrible crimes. All you cared about was that the train not leave without you so you could meet that woman waiting for you. She wrote so quickly her handwriting lost its regularity and straight lines and took up all the space on the paper. She crossed out words carelessly, leaving ink stains and scrapes at the places where the almost dry pen point became clogged, like a mouth without saliva, possessed by the impulse to say what she’d never said, to break immodestly with her timidity and sense of propriety, she must do things to you it would disgust me to do. It seems that’s what all you men want. That’s why you go to those indecent houses. That’s what she must have been thinking when he entered the room at the sanatorium and saw her turned toward the window, indifferent to his presence, letting herself be carried away by exhaustion, complete surrender, pure physical inertia, obedience to the weight of her body, its immobility after asphyxia, the turbid water that entered her nose and mouth and flooded her lungs: still water where her body was reflected, outlined against the sky before she took that step into the void, letting herself fall like a sack of clay, relieved at last of the awkward, sweaty burden of herself.

The train moves forward along the river that pulls in the opposite direction, toward the sea, great barges loaded with minerals or mountains of scrap metal or garbage, and light sailboats suspended over the water, tossing like paper boats, white sails agitated by the wind in undulations similar to those on the surface where, half submerged like the back of an alligator, an enormous tree trunk is floating, perhaps torn away from the bank, gulls flapping over its thatch of roots. If someone were to jump into the water here, rescue would be impossible. He would prefer simply to observe: not to have memories or desires or regrets (desires for what will not be granted him now, regrets for what he can no longer remedy), not to calculate the time remaining in the trip, not to feel nervous about missing the station or not being ready to get off when the train arrives because the conductor told him the stop is brief and he ought to walk to the exit door ahead of time. But he hasn’t been traveling very long. He looks at his watch as often as anxious men puff on or light cigarettes; he looks at it and so little time has passed since he last looked, he thinks time has stopped and brings the watch up to his ear in a gesture of alarm. A pronounced curve of the train tracks now allows him to see the entire breadth of the river and the two banks at the same time, and above them, as light as a drawing or a mirage, the most beautiful bridge he’s ever seen, its columns and arches and the metal framework of its two towers shining in the sun like a weightless structure of steel plates, the cables prominent against the blue or almost disappearing in the blinding light like the silk threads of a spider’s web vibrating in the wind. He recognizes the George Washington Bridge, more perfect in reality than in photographs and plans, with the radiance of a recently completed Gothic cathedral, still white, as in Le Corbusier’s evocations, but more beautiful than any cathedral, delicate in its formidable scale, in its form, as pure as a mathematical axiom, as necessary as those marvelous everyday objects placed on the table in the lecture hall by Professor Rossman, who will never know the emotion of seeing the bridge in the distance. He presses his face to the window for a better view. For his saint’s day two years earlier he bought his son Miguel a Meccano kit of the George Washington Bridge, and the boy was so excited, so overwhelmed by the gift that he couldn’t assemble it: all the pieces fell when it finally seemed he’d begun to succeed, and he burst into tears. The inverted bow of the cables cross from one bank to the other with the exactness of a compass curve drawn in blue ink on white Bristol board. There’s no stone facing to hide or ennoble the structure: light passes through the towers like the geometrical filigrees of a latticed shutter. The naked towers, pure prisms of steel, their verticality as firm as the lightly bent horizontal that extends with only their support between the two banks, the cables like bows and the double strings of a harp, vibrating in the wind. Mathematical purity: two vertical lines crossed by a horizontal, a bow inverted at approximately thirty degrees, its far ends at the points of intersection of the horizontal and the verticals. Gradually, as the train approaches, lightness is transformed into weight, into the tremendous gravitation of steel girders on the gigantic columns that support them, sunk into the living rock beneath the riverbed and the mud, their granite blocks pounded by waves created by a freighter as it passes under the bridge, but the train immediately pulls ahead of it. Perhaps he chose the wrong occupation. An architect’s work has room for frivolities and whims that the ascetic art of engineering doesn’t allow (“You architects, aren’t you really decorators?” the engineer Torroja had said to him, and it wasn’t entirely a joke): no building can be more beautiful than a bridge, a form purer and at the same time more artificial, superimposed on nature’s lack of moderation like a sheet of transparent paper where a sketch has been traced. For a few seconds he can appreciate up close, through the window, the carved surface of the large ashlars as magnificent as those in a Florentine or Roman palace, or the blocks of primitive rock the size of the tightened bolts along the length of the girders; he has the sensation of touching the rough spots and cracks on the coat of paint worn away by the weather, its texture as rich as the bark of a great tree; he tilts his head in an attempt to take in the height of the columns and feels the dizziness of their gravitation. The scale of the bridge is measured against that of the river, as wide and powerful as a sea, the palisades, the woods the train enters, faster now that the city has been left behind. He’ll send his children a postcard in color, like the ones he’s already sent of the Brooklyn Bridge and the ocean liners along the docks against a backdrop of skyscrapers, and of the Chrysler Building, a postcard like the one of the Empire State Building he forgot to mail though he’d already put a stamp on it. He’ll mark a dot at the bottom of one of the towers of the George Washington Bridge to give them an idea of the size of a human figure, as small as an insect, lost in a colossal world and at the same time exalted in intelligence and imagination because nothing of what overwhelmed him belonged to the realm of nature. Equally diminutive men had conceived of the bridge, imagined it, drawing indecisive lines in a sketchbook; they had calculated stress and resistance with great precision, then drilled into the earth with machines, gone underwater in diving suits and lead shoes, climbed oscillating metal structures to solder girders, tighten cables, pound rivets with powerful hammers. Human work was sacred: the courage to confront icy winds, fatigue, and vertigo, not in the name of any ideal or passion but to complete a job and earn one’s daily bread; the unanimous commitment to erecting something where nothing existed before — a bridge, the rails and ties of train tracks nailed one by one into the earth, a house, a library at the top of a hill. Building something and knowing that from the moment the work is completed, time and the elements are already beginning to undermine it, wear it out with the expansion of heat or the aggression of wind and rain, with insidious damp, the oxidation of iron, the decay of wood, the slow pulverization of brick, the corrosion of stone, the sudden disaster of fire. Teams of men up on the cables, black dots like notes on a score or birds on telegraph wires, repairing something, perhaps repainting, because the most solid paint would degrade quickly in this climate attacked by the ocean’s saltpeter, cracked by extreme cold and ice, softened by the unforgiving summer heat. But it was time that completed the work; the passage of time, heat and cold, constant use; time that revealed and consumed the beauty of a brick wall eroded by weather, or flights of stairs worn by footsteps, or a wooden railing burnished by the constant slide of hands. So many years driven by an obsession to finish things immediately, to leap from one minute to the next as if leaping between cars on a moving train. Only now does he begin to realize that perhaps what he’d lacked wasn’t speed but deliberation, patience and not perplexed agitation.

Yet building something is so arduous. There’s a silent resentment against the effort, a destructive underground current, the impulse of the child who tramples his recently completed sandcastle at the beach, the joy of flattening towers with the sole of the foot, destroying walls with a kick; Miguel crying in his room, red-faced, surrounded by the ruins of the Meccano, too much crying for his age, his sister looking at him with annoyance from her desk; teams of dynamiters in the late July heat and the first hallucinatory days of the war attempting to blow up the monument to the Sacred Heart of Jesus on Los Angeles Hill, bringing large augers and hammer drills on trucks from Madrid, squads of militiamen firing their rifles in successive volleys at the enormous statue, its arms spread wide; the crowd illuminated by the brilliance of the flames, eyes shining, the unanimous uproar that burst from open mouths on the night of July 19 when they saw the dome of a church collapse amid brilliant embers and a lava of melted lead. In the heat of the summer night the fire, like blasts from a furnace, made the air tremble. How much time, how much labor, how much ingenuity had gone into building that dome a little more than two centuries ago, how many men breaking stone, how many mules and oxen dragging huge blocks from the quarry, how many trees and how many axes needed to prepare the rafters, how many callused hands skinned, tugging on pulley ropes, in which furnaces was lead molded for the roofs or the red clay and glazed tiles baked? But everything burned so quickly; the fire sucked in hot air to keep feeding its own voracity; around Ignacio Abel men and women danced as if celebrating the apotheosis of a primitive deity, some shooting rifles or pistols into the air, as intoxicated by fire as by words or anthems, celebrating not the literal collapse of a church dome in Madrid but the imaginary downfall of an old world that deserved to perish. He recalls the sensation of the fire stinging the skin on his face, the smell of gasoline, the suffocating smoke after a gust of wind, the taste of ash in his mouth, and afterward the stink of smoke on his clothes. The other side destroys with more modern methods, not with the fire of medieval apocalypses but with Italian and German planes that machine-gun refugees on the roads and drop bombs from a comfortable height over a Madrid that lacks not only antiaircraft defenses but also effective searchlights and sirens. Our side executes crudely, with fury, the other side with the methodical deliberation of butchers, shooting from a distance and with infallible marksmanship at terrified militiamen who run away, then using sharpened bayonets up close. Neither side rests at night. At night the designated victim offers even less resistance. He waits motionless, apathetic, like an animal transfixed by the headlights of the car that will knock it down. On both sides, headlights are the last thing those who are going to be executed see. As for Professor Rossman, whose glasses had been stomped on, the light must have hurt his poor colorless eyes. In the darkness Ignacio Abel heard a voice saying his name, and it took him a moment to realize that if he didn’t see anything, it was because he was covering his eyes with both hands.

He looks at his watch again, though he looked at it only a minute ago, like the smoker who doesn’t remember that he has a cigarette and anxiously lights another. If they haven’t attacked the city yet, it’s likely that the engines of the planes can already be heard in the frightened silence of a night without lights. Moreno Villa must hear them behind the closed window in his room at the Residence, where on other nights he’s heard the orders and guns of nearby firing squads, the purr of cars that light the scene and wait with their motors running for the job to be over. Perhaps the planes fly in from the north and Miguel and Lita hear them passing over the peaks of the Sierra, knowing they’re going to bomb Madrid, imagining their father is still in the city, or has died, that they won’t see him again, their last image of him a badly made photo that disappears in the developing fluid, the light suit, the black briefcase, the summer hat waving on the other side of the gate as the train whistle sounds again.

With a whistle like a ship’s siren the train moves away from the riverbank and plunges at higher speed into the tunnel of yellow, ocher, orange, blue, and red leaves of a forest so dense the afternoon light can barely penetrate. The wind caused by the power of the train raises eddies of leaves that flutter like clouds of agitated butterflies, collide with the window, and are rapidly left behind. Leaves of oak, maple, elm, trees he’s never seen, still plentiful at the treetops and floating through the air or covering the ground like a great snowstorm of reds, yellows, ochers, among tree trunks as extravagant as primitive columns and impenetrable thickets where it seems primordial nature has been preserved only a few steps from the train, like the river’s oceanic current that breaks in diminished waves against the bank adjacent to the rails. His eyes are lost in the density of the woods, as if suddenly there were no traces of the city only a few minutes behind them, or the bridge that testifies to a proximate human presence, as if the continent had closed in on itself in a flood of rivers and forests, erasing the scars of the invaders’ presence. The ruins of an abolished civilization might be concealed under vegetation this dense. Coming in through the window now isn’t the smell of algae and the ocean but the odor of leaves, damp earth, and fertile soil where vegetable matter rots in the shade of impenetrable undergrowth. Entire forests of pine groves in the Sierra Morena and the Sierra de Cazorla were cut down to build the ships of Philip II’s armada, which a storm sank in just a few hours near the English coast. Dead animals, birds without shelter, rain washing away soil on slopes the tree roots had held in place, finally thankless bare rock, the harsh homeland of goatherds, rachitic peasants, the ecstatic, determined to cut and burn more and leave no refuge even for scorpions.

He took Judith Biely for a walk in the Royal Botanical Garden the second time they met. She recognized American trees, the identical fall colors, though it surprised her that the forest ended abruptly and they immediately came upon the straight paths, fences, and pergolas of a French garden. She walked by his side and both were silent, listening to the rustle of dry leaves under their feet. They’d done no more than caress and kiss with apprehensive awkwardness in the greenish half-light of the bar at the Hotel Florida, and then in the car when Ignacio Abel drove her for the first time to her boarding house, the two of them surprised and silent following their boldness. They hadn’t seen each other naked. Conversation had distracted them from the fact of being together and permitted them to suspend the connection affecting them behind their words. They’d agreed to meet at the entrance to the Botanical Garden, and the impulse for one to go to the other had been halted in the prelude to physical intimacy. Indecisive or diffident, they didn’t kiss or take each other by the hand. A renewed timidity wiped away the closeness of their first meeting; it seemed impossible that they’d embraced and kissed at length. They had to begin again, probe the reestablished limits one more time, the invisible restraints of good manners. How strange that all of it had occurred, that only a year had gone by since then, that the October afternoon light was almost identical, like the smell and colors of the leaves. “And the strangest thing of all is that I feel so at home in Madrid,” Judith had said just before she fell silent, her hands in the pockets of her light coat, her head bare, looking around as calmly as on the first day they were together on the street, on the sidewalk of the Gran Vía when they’d left Van Doren’s apartment, in front of the movie posters covering the façade of the Palacio de la Prensa. In the Garden, on a cool, damp October morning with the subtle scent of smoke and fallen leaves in the air, they read the labels with the names of the trees in Latin and Spanish. Judith pronounced them aloud, uncertain, allowing herself to be corrected, taking pleasure in names that alluded to distant origins: the elm of the Caucasus, the weeping pine of the Himalayas, the giant sequoia of California. She told him she felt more at home in Madrid than in any European city she’d visited in the past year and a half, and it had been true from the moment she got off the train in the North Station and went out to a sunny, damp street in the first light of a September morning and took a taxi to the Plaza de Santa Ana, filled with produce and flower stands covered by awnings, the shouts of vendors and the warbling of birds for sale in their wire cages, the cries and flutes of knife grinders and the sound of conversations coming through the wide-open doors of the cafés. Her New York neighborhood had been like that when she was a girl, she said, but perhaps with a more anguished vitality, a more visible fury in the daily search for sustenance or profit, in the harshness of social relationships, men and women from remote places in the world having to earn a living from the first day and without anyone’s help in a city that for them was strange and overwhelming beyond the familiar streets where immigrants crowded together, dressed as they had dressed in the villages and ghettos of the far eastern reaches of Europe, surrounded by signs, shouts, and cooking odors that reproduced those of the old country. In Madrid the street peddler standing on a corner or the patron leaning on the bar in a tavern gave Judith the impression of always having been there, inhabiting an uneventful indolence, like that of the men in dark suits who looked out at the street through the large windows of cafés or the drowsing guards in the rooms of the Prado. He asked her whether, in the matter of Oriental indolence, she’d tried the clerks in public offices yet, gone at nine to take care of some transaction and waited until after ten, and found herself looking, beyond the arc of a small window, at a face both embittered and impassive, a nicotine-stained index finger moving back and forth, negating something, or pointing accusingly at a missing stamp on a document, a seal, the signature of someone you’d have to look for in another, more obscure office where the window for serving the public wasn’t open yet.

“Don’t mistake backwardness for exoticism,” Ignacio Abel said, uncertain at having used the familiar form of address, as if it were an inappropriate move, not daring merely to touch her but to desire her fully. “We Spaniards have the misfortune of being picturesque.”

“You seem and don’t seem Spanish,” said Judith, and she stopped, looking at him with a smile of recognition, more adventurous than he, impatient, wanting to let him know she did remember that what happened the last time wasn’t forgotten.

“Do I seem American to you?”

“More American than anybody.”

“Phil Van Doren would have his doubts. His family came to America three centuries ago, and mine thirty years ago.”

He didn’t like her saying that name, Van Doren, and even less the casual name Phil. He thought of the fixed, sarcastic eyes under depilated brows, the blunt, hairy hands with rings pressing Judith’s waist, the moment when, just having walked out of his study and leaving them alone, he looked in again, pushing the door abruptly as though he’d forgotten something.

“For him we Spaniards must be something like Abyssinians. He talks about his trips through the interior of the country as if he had to take along native carriers.”

He realized his hostility was a deep personal ill will caused by his jealousy of a link between Van Doren and Judith from which he was excluded and about which he didn’t dare question her — what right did he have? If Van Doren didn’t like women, why did he touch her so much? How could Ignacio Abel feel confident next to her when they were alone, if he didn’t dare touch her or look her in the eyes? He heard train whistles in the nearby station, and car engines and horns on the Paseo del Prado, muffled by the dense trees, like the rustle of the dry leaves beneath their feet that sank slightly into the damp earth, only a year ago, a year and a few days, in another city, another continent, another time. And if she had regrets or simply considered it unimportant, or thought there was something embarrassing or ridiculous in the eagerness of a well-known married man with children, a man in his late forties who couldn’t risk being seen in public with a woman who wasn’t his wife, a foreign younger woman observed by the vigilant faces of Madrid in taverns and cafés. What was he doing, he must have asked himself when they both fell silent and conversation no longer stretched the ruse of a pretext beneath them like a net, leaving the office much earlier than he should have, making a date with Judith with an excuse of almost pathetic puerility, showing her the Botanical Garden, his favorite place in Madrid, he told her, the best of Spain, better than the Prado, better than University City, his motherland full of statues of naturalists and botanists, not bloody generals or cretinous kings, his island of civilization dedicated to the knowledge and patience to classify nature according to the scale of human intelligence. Then Judith stopped, facing him on the other side of one of those basin fountains where red fish swam and a weak jet of water rose, and before she said anything, he knew she’d refer to what hadn’t been mentioned so far, the other night in the bar at the Florida.

“I wasn’t sure you’d call me.”

“How could I not call you?” Ignacio Abel felt himself blushing slightly. He spoke so softly it was difficult for her to understand what he was saying. “What made you think that? I haven’t stopped thinking about you.”

“You were so serious while you were driving, not saying anything, not looking at me. I thought you must have regretted it.”

“I couldn’t believe I dared kiss you.”

“Will you dare now?”

“How do you say me muero de ganas in English?”

“‘I’m dying to.’”

But in the boldness he’d felt on the afternoon of their first meeting, there was not only desire but also alcohol, the clear liquid in the cone-shaped glasses served in Van Doren’s apartment by the waiter following his employer’s instructions, his subtle, imperious gestures. The intoxication of drink, the novelty of words, the same song playing again on the phonograph, his own voice slightly changed, the October sky over the roofs of Madrid, the faces of the guests, most of them American, the works by Klee and Juan Gris, the blank, diaphanous space that took him back to his time in Germany, just as his desire for Judith wakened the part of him that had been sleeping since his affair with his Hungarian lover. He said, looking at his watch when Van Doren had left them alone in his office, “Now I really do have to go,” and was grateful as if for a disproportionate gift when Judith replied that she did, too, and would leave with him, and in the elevator she sighed with relief, arranging her hair in the mirror. Out on the street they’d walked together for the first time, in the light of day and among people, with no need for caution, even when it was time to say goodbye and nothing happened, time for each of them to walk away into the crowd on the Gran Vía at five o’clock on a Friday afternoon, store windows and large, hand-painted canvas banners on the façades of movie theaters, honking, the sun shining on the silvery metal of automobiles, a present without a future, the inevitable future unleashed by a word that might not be said. He could say what was true, that it was urgent for him to go back to the office, to documents and blueprints and urgent calls he had to answer. He felt lightheaded: if he drove with the window down, the air would clear his mind. At each moment possible futures unfolded that burn like flares in the darkness and a second later are extinguished. He wanted to go on listening to her voice, the peculiar way her Spanish vowels and consonants sounded, to prolong the state of gentle physical intoxication, her proximity the powerful imminence of something, the exciting, mysterious ambit of the feminine. Judith stood looking with a smile of recognition at the sunlight on the terraces of the tallest buildings, the limpid blue of the sky against which the tower of the Capitol Theater was outlined.

“I look up and it’s as if I were in New York.”

“But the buildings must be much taller there.”

“It’s not the buildings, it’s the light. This is the same light as in New York right now. I mean, that will be there in six hours.”

He could suggest they have a drink and Judith would smile and thank him and say she was late for an appointment with her students or a talk at the Residence or at the Center for Historical Studies. He thought about his dark, empty apartment when he’d go home that night, when he’d open the door and not hear the voices of his children; perhaps they were exploring the garden of the house in the Sierra, or planning an expedition, like the ones in Jules Verne’s novels, for his arrival the following day. In a lighthearted tone that surprised him and hid his fear, he told Judith he was inviting her to have a drink at the Hotel Florida across the street. After a moment of hesitation she agreed, shrugging with a smile, and took his arm to cross the Gran Vía in the middle of traffic.

Words are nothing, the delirium of desires and phantasmagoria whirling in vain inside the hard, impenetrable concavity of the skull; only physical contact counts, the touch of another hand, the warmth of a body, the mysterious beat of a pulse. How long has it been since someone touched him, a figure folding in on himself on the train seat, as hard and mineral-like as a thick, closed seashell. He’s dreamed of Judith Biely’s voice (which he hardly remembers after only three months), but its sound was less true than the sensation of being brushed, touched by her hand, pressed against her smooth skin, kissed by her lips, caressed by her curly hair almost as immaterially as by her breath, like a faint breeze that has silently come through an open window. He was walking beside her along an avenue in the Botanical Garden and suddenly they were silent and all that could be heard were the leaves beneath their feet: the leaves of trees brought as seeds or frail shoots from America in the eighteenth century, housed in the dark holds of ships, waiting to germinate in this distant land where Judith Biely, after almost two years of traveling, feels at home, in a homeland she never knew she had until now, recognizing the trunks and the shapes and colors of the leaves, learning their names in Spanish, saying them in English so he could pronounce after her. He seemed awkward now and much younger than the first few times she saw him, younger and softer at each meeting, as if his life were being projected backward: the tall, professorial figure behind a podium at the Residence, with his dark suit and gray hair and judgmental appearance. The man who afterward looked at her across the crowd from the other end of the room, who left without saying goodbye, beside his wife, who was visibly older than he; who appeared in the doorway of Van Doren’s apartment; who leaned stiffly toward her in a private booth in the bar of the Hotel Florida and almost didn’t dare kiss her; who now, only a few days later, disconcerted, erudite, pronounces the names of trees in Latin, not realizing the mud on the ground was dirtying his shoes and the cuffs of his trousers, stopping because she’d stopped and not daring to meet her eyes, perhaps regretful, overwhelmed by the responsibility of having gone so far, of having called her again, unable to continue talking, to go on pretending he was some kind of teacher or mentor of botany or Spanish customs and she a foreign pupil, paralyzed by the recognition of a desire that couldn’t be contained and that he couldn’t manage, a desire he barely remembered existed.

“I’m dying to.”