In the Night of Time

9

NOT USED TO LYING, the ease of concealing something for the first time in a long while surprised him. The novelty of pretense was as stimulating as his resurgent desire and the signs of falling in love. There was a kind of innocence in such perfect impunity. What no one could know had occurred only a few hours earlier, and was clear and fresh in his memory, and still had left no trace in his external appearance. The mind’s secrecy was a prodigious gift. Lying on the grass in the mild sun of a Saturday afternoon, he talked distractedly with Adela about the children’s new school term, and though she was looking into his eyes she couldn’t know what he was thinking, what he was reliving, delighting in the precision of each detail, each minute. His memory was a camera obscura where only he could see Judith Biely, a gallery of murmurs where only he heard her voice, as close as if she were talking into his ear. Adela was probably grateful for his talkative, friendly mood when he arrived that morning at the house in the Sierra, his rested, almost smiling air, his amiable disposition toward her and her relatives, which came as a surprise since he often seemed uncomfortable around them. She was in the kitchen helping the maids peel quinces — she liked the brown and gold down that remained on her fingertips and had so delicate a scent when she brought her fingers to her nose — when she was startled by the sound of a car’s engine. Pleasantly surprised that her husband had arrived earlier than expected, fearful he would be unsociable, in a bad mood, sleep-deprived. She would have liked not to have so acute a perception of the variations in his state of mind, not to respond so immediately to any indication of a change of mood, of anger or dejection, as if over the years she’d sharpened an instrument of detection so sensitive it approached prophecy, because it warned of certain symptoms before they occurred. Her children’s footsteps resounded as they galloped down the stairs. “Ah, my faithful vassals at the battlements, a knight-errant approaches the castle, if not an inn or station snack bar,” Don Francisco de Asís declaimed with theatrical exaggeration under the squat granite columns of the porch when his grandchildren crossed the garden on their way to the gate. Ignacio Abel stopped the car in front of it, looking at himself for a moment in the rearview mirror, prepared without remorse for the novelty of lying. In the seat next to him was no trace of the woman who only the night before had sat there, half closing her eyes to feel the cool air coming through the lowered window and blowing her hair away from her face while he drove up the Castellana. She’d looked into the same mirror to fix her lipstick and comb her hair with her fingers before getting out. The eyes that a few hours earlier had looked at her with so much attention and desire now revealed nothing, the same eyes that had seen her come near, opening her lips and tilting back her head. How strange that this memory wasn’t visible to others, that it was so easy to keep the secret, like a thief who shakes your hand and steals something valuable with no effort and in view of everyone and then walks away in the full light of day. He got out of the car and his daughter ran toward him and hung around his neck to kiss him. The boy remained standing by the gate, expectant and serious, more timid than his sister, weaker, perhaps suspecting something, alert to any sign that his father’s presence was not completely certain, for he tended to arrive later than he’d announced, and probably this time, too, his stay would be shorter than he’d promised. Embracing his father, he then clung to him as if to make sure he really had arrived, as if deep down he’d feared he wouldn’t appear. In the clear space of the garden in front of the house, Don Francisco de Asís received Ignacio Abel with open arms in a melodramatic gesture of welcome, like a parody of the classic Spanish theater he liked so much. “What a surprise, my illustrious son-in-law! Your presence honors this humble rustic dwelling, ancestral home of my elders!” He gave his son-in-law two loud, wet kisses, too absorbed in himself or too innocent or childish to notice Abel’s physical displeasure, his attitude of rejection. But Adela noticed it, waiting in the doorway, drying her hands, which smelled of quince, on her apron. She heard her father’s hackneyed declamation through her husband’s ears, and what otherwise would have been no more than one of an old man’s tiresome habits that awaken only patience and some tenderness sounded to her like embarrassing nonsense. She noticed her husband’s expression as he pulled back slightly; she knew what he must be thinking and was ashamed of her father’s eccentricities, guilty about the embarrassment and disloyalty to him that muddied the otherwise loving resignation with which she would have accepted those eccentricities if not for Ignacio Abel. Too sensitive to the states of mind of someone who paid little attention to hers, as inclined as her son to depend too much on an undependable affection. The girl didn’t suffer from these kinds of insecurities: she walked with her father along the gravel path, carrying his briefcase like a page in his service, certain of the preference bestowed on her. She became pleasingly childish in his presence, to the same degree that with her mother she defended somewhat defiantly her right not to be treated like a little girl.

How strange that in this part of his life nothing had been altered by what only he and Judith Biely knew, that he didn’t have to pretend in order to conceal — as if he’d crossed the invisible border between two contiguous worlds, the inhabitants of one not suspecting the existence of the other. And though he missed Judith and would have liked to wake beside her, he delighted in the presence of his children and the scent of rockrose and resinous wood smoke in the Sierra air, the first autumn colors in the garden. The Japanese creeper climbed like a flame curling around a column at the entrance and along the balcony railing, the vibrant red of its leaves standing out against the granite and whitewash on the façade of the house that had a certain rustic nobility in its proportions. On Saturday morning, time in this other world seemed suspended. A cowbell’s slow clang, the lowing of cattle from nearby pastures, and occasional shooting by hunters didn’t disturb the autumnal stillness. Ignacio Abel was self-absorbed, doing nothing, the newspaper on his lap, sitting on the porch that faced south, and the sun had a slow density of honey that warmed the air, turned things golden, revived dozing insects. The last figs were opening on the fig tree, revealing the red pulp that sparrows and blackbirds pecked at and wasps sucked. Inside the house the family chattered noisily, Doña Cecilia’s shrill tones rising above the others, supported by Don Francisco de Asís’s booming organ voice, like a basso continuo. There would be elections, he declaimed, in a long-sleeved undershirt and slippers, his suspenders hanging down on each side, the paper in his hands like a banner ruined by the misfortunes of Spanish politics. There would be elections, and if the right won again, the left would rise up in another attempt at a Bolshevik revolution, and if the left won, the Bolshevik revolution would also be inevitable, a collapse of civilization as terrifying as in Russia. Don Francisco de Asís liked the word “terrifying,” the word “civilization.” Doña Cecilia asked him please not to talk about those things: in her husband’s booming voice, apocalyptic prophecies gave her, she said, an upset stomach. Don Francisco de Asís voted sensibly for the Catholic and somewhat cajoling right of Gil Robles, but what truly moved him was the oratory of Don José Calvo Sotelo: what emotion when that man said “ship of state” or “the backbone of the nation,” with what good judgment had he reformed and strengthened public administration throughout his mandate as minister during the dictatorship of Don Miguel Primo de Rivera. The boy played ball in the garden, imagining he was eluding famous soccer players, happy to be at the house in the Sierra, happy his father had come. The girl sat on the swing, balancing slowly as she read a book, the tips of her sandals brushing against the ground. Bluish oak groves in the distance; from the pastures the echoes of isolated shooting; on the ground quinces and burst pomegranates, their skins red and dry; on the grapevine that shaded the entrance to the house the last grapes had the same rich honey color as the October sun (he recalled the fruit bowl of grapes and quinces in Moreno Villa’s room). His briefcase filled with documents and drawings lay on the table outdoors where the family had supper on summer nights, but Ignacio Abel felt too lazy to open it. Time had paused in a sweet somnolence that weighed on his eyelids. In Madrid Judith Biely would be thinking about the same things, wondering where he’d gone. They hadn’t spoken about seeing each other again when they said goodbye. As if satisfied with what had already happened, first in the half-light of the private booth, when they suddenly faced each other in silence after a lively conversation, then in the uncomfortable interior of the car. Looking for a continuation, making plans, would have profaned the unexpected paradise where they suddenly found themselves, not as if they’d traveled there but had awakened and were not completely certain where they were. Concealment was so easy: to think about Judith Biely’s bare thighs above her stockings and at the same time to smile at Adela, who came out of the house bringing him a glass of wine and an appetizer, a foretaste of the meal being prepared, Doña Cecilia’s renowned arroz con pollo. And it hadn’t been difficult, when he arrived, to kiss Adela on the lips while he passed his hand along her waist in an unusual gesture that the boy’s vigilant eyes noted with approval. He was so unaccustomed to lying, he hadn’t even devised a response for when Adela or his father-in-law or the children asked him what he’d done yesterday afternoon. But it wasn’t at all difficult to invent something on the spot, and he was astonished it was all so easy, that something unforgettable could have occurred with no consequences and flowed with as little premeditation as the words they’d said in a dim corner of the bar at the Hotel Florida, which they chose with tacit complicity. That was how they’d talked as they rode down in the elevator of the Palacio de la Prensa, how Judith Biely had held his arm when they crossed the Gran Vía, dodging traffic.

He’d forgotten the sensation of novelty, the thrill of desiring a woman so intensely it was the pure magnetism of her female presence that made him tremble, more than her physical beauty or the slightly exotic elegance of her dress or the spontaneity with which she had leaned on his arm, holding it tighter when a speeding car passed close to them. It was her singularity as a woman, possessed of a life that seemed richer and more mysterious because he knew nothing about it, with a language and accent in Spanish that didn’t belong to anyone with her same background but only to her, as intrinsic to the attraction she exercised as the shape of her eyelids or her large mouth. With impunity he felt he inhabited two worlds. The emotional intoxication of yesterday afternoon in Madrid was transmitted without guilt to his perceptions this morning in the house in the Sierra, just as it had accompanied him on his drive along the highway to La Coruña, the car’s speed as assuring and joyful as his self-awareness. The freshness of the air on that October morning, the oak groves and houses as clear in the distance as if etched in diamond, a motionless swelling of clouds overflowing the mountains of El Escorial with the magnificence of an ice cliff.

Judith had liked listening to music on the radio as they drove across Madrid. With concealed vanity Ignacio Abel pressed the accelerator and handled the controls of the recently installed radio. The speed and the music seemed to feed on each other. In the headlights the straight rows of trees along the Castellana and the palaces behind the gates and gardens became visible; streetcar tracks gleamed on paving stones. He was lucky to have become an adult in an age of extraordinary machines, more beautiful than the statues of antiquity, more incredible than the marvels in stories. Very soon they’d all conspire to facilitate his love for Judith Biely. Streetcars and automobiles would rapidly carry him to her, prolonging the meager time of their meetings; telephones would secretly bring him her voice when he couldn’t have her with him and he’d call her from his house, covering his mouth with his hand, feigning a conversation about work if anyone came near; movie theaters would welcome them in their simulacrum of hospitable darkness when they wanted to hide from the light of day; telegraph offices would remain open late so he could send her a telegram on the spur of the moment. Mechanized belts transported the letters they soon began to write to each other and canceled the stamps automatically, allowing their messages to traverse distances with more accurate speed. Thanks to a splendid Fiat motor, he’d driven from one world to another in less than two hours. Adela noticed he was talking more than usual that morning. He greeted his mother-in-law, the maiden aunts, distant relatives whose names he never remembered. The family began to prepare early for the celebration — moved back to Saturday to make it more resplendent — of Don Francisco de Asís’s saint’s day. From the kitchen came the bubbling aroma of the stew, along with Doña Cecilia’s melodramatic voice deliberating with Adela, the maids, and Don Francisco de Asís regarding the advantages and disadvantages of starting the rice, for fear that if her son Víctor arrived late, as he so often did, he’d find it overcooked when after all he liked it so much and it was so easy for rice to be overdone and then it lost all its savor. In this family there was nothing that wasn’t a tradition, a commemoration. Every time Doña Cecilia prepared her stew—“legendary” in the opinion of Don Francisco de Asís — the conflict regarding the proper moment to put in the rice was repeated almost word for word, what Don Francisco de Asís called “the burning question”: whether to add the rice to the bubbling liquid now or wait a little longer; whether to send the maid to the gate to see if Señorito Víctor was arriving from Madrid; whether to hold off at least until they heard the next train at the station. Ignacio Abel thought about Judith Biely — but he didn’t have to invoke her, she was a constant, secret presence in his memory — and he greeted and chatted like an actor who doesn’t need to make much of an effort to perform his assigned role. He listened, agreed without understanding anything, refined his capacity for resignation and self-absorption. When Víctor finally arrived — on an almost telepathic hunch Doña Cecilia had put in the rice only a few minutes earlier — it was in no way difficult for him to accept the excessive grip of his handshake and not show displeasure. He didn’t even lie; he told the partial truth, explaining to Adela and the children that he’d spent all of Friday afternoon at the home of an American millionaire who lived in Madrid and had invited him to travel to America to teach some classes and design a building.

“A skyscraper?” said the boy. “Like the Telephone Company?”

“Bigger, dummy. In America skyscrapers are much taller.”

“Don’t talk like that to your brother.”

“A library. In the middle of a forest. On the banks of a very wide river.”

“The Mississippi?”

“You think that’s the only river in America?”

“It’s the one in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.”

“The Hudson River.”

“That has its mouth right at New York.”

“She thinks she knows all about geography.”

“Will you take us with you?”

“If your mother agrees, this afternoon I’ll take you to the irrigation pond — that’s much closer than America.”

He didn’t pretend. It was easy for him to talk to Adela and his children and not feel the sting of imposture or betrayal. What happened in his secret life didn’t interfere with this one but transferred to it some of its sunlit plenitude. And he didn’t care too much about the ominous prospect of immersion in the celebrations of his in-laws, usually as suffocating for him as the air in the places where they lived, heavy with dust from draperies, rugs, faux heraldic tapestries, smells of fried food and garlic, ecclesiastical colognes, liniments for the pains of rheumatism, sweaty scapulars. A sharp awareness of the other, invisible world to which he could return soon made more tolerable the painstaking ugliness of the one where he now found himself and where, in spite of the passage of years, he’d never stopped being a stranger, an intruder. The maiden aunts swarmed in the sewing room, which had an oriel window facing south. They covered their mouths when they laughed, leaned toward one another to say things in a subdued voice, embroidered sheets and pillowcases with romantic motifs of a century ago, marked patterns with slivers of soap polished to the same shine as their faces of girls grown old. Ignacio Abel kissed them one by one and still wasn’t sure of their number. The uncle who was a priest would arrive when it was time to eat, with a good appetite but a somber face, recounting tales of ungodliness or assaults against the Church, predicting the return to government — if it was true that elections would be called — of the same men who in 1931 secretly encouraged the burning of convents. Abel’s recently arrived brother-in-law, Víctor, dressed for a Sierra weekend in a kind of hunting or riding outfit, extended his hand with the palm on the diagonal, turned partially downward, in a gesture he must have thought athletic or energetic. “Ignacio, how good to see you.” His thin hair, lying close to his scalp, formed a widow’s peak. He was younger than he looked; what aged him was a rather perpetual scowl and the shadow of a beard on his bony, prominent chin, the hardness of his features, a product of his determination to display manliness without weaknesses or cracks. His Hispanic, virile brother-in-law’s cordiality contrasted with a deep distrust of Ignacio Abel that was only in part ideological: Víctor gave the impression of lying in wait, looking for some threat to the honor or well-being of his sister, toward whom he felt protective although ten years her junior. Adela treated him with the limitless indulgence and docility of a pliant mother, which irritated Ignacio Abel. Víctor carried a pistol and a blackjack. Sometimes he came to eat at his parents’ house in the shirt and leather straps of a Falangist centurion. Adela was both submissive and protective: “He always liked uniforms, and the pistol doesn’t even have bullets.” He raised his chin as he shook Ignacio Abel’s hand and looked into his eyes, searching for signs of danger, not suspecting anything. He showed them the gift he’d brought for his father: a pseudo-antique Quijote bound in leather, with gilt letters and edges and reproductions of Doré. The family possessed an insatiable appetite for atrocious objects, fake antiquities, Gothic calligraphy on parchment, luxury bindings, and illusory genealogies. On the façade of the house, behind the two granite columns that held up the terrace, were embedded the heraldic coats of arms of the two family names, those of Don Francisco de Asís and of Doña Cecilia: Ponce-Cañizares and Salcedo. In the family the distinctive traits of each of the two branches were passionately debated: My son Víctor has the unmistakable Ponce-Cañizares nose; you can tell the girl came into this world with a pure Salcedo character. From the time they were born, the children of Ignacio Abel and Adela were picked up by their grandfather, the maiden aunts, Abel’s brother-in-law Víctor, and the uncle who was a priest, and scrutinized as they discussed to which of the two lines a nose or a type of hair or dimples belonged, from which Ponce or Cañizares or Salcedo the baby had inherited the tendency to cry so loudly — those strong Cañizares lungs! No sooner had the child taken a few hesitant steps than the exact resemblance to some especially graceful ancestor was recognized, or its Ponce or Ponce-Cañizares or Salcedo origin vehemently argued over with the attention to detail of philologists debating an obscure etymology. In the heat of these gratifying diatribes they tended to forget the inevitable genetic contribution of the children’s father, unless they could relate it to the hint of a defect: The boy seems to have inherited his father’s eccentricity, one of them would say. At family meals Adela would look at her husband out of the corner of her eye and become irritated with herself for not knowing how to overcome the stress of imagining what he must be thinking, what he must be seeing. You despise my parents, who love you like a son, who love you even more because your parents aren’t alive. You see them as foolish and ridiculous and don’t realize they’re not young anymore and are developing the manias of old people like the ones you or I will have when we’re their age. You think my brother is a Fascist and a parasite, and when he says something to you your answer is so dismissive even I feel embarrassed. You can’t see any goodness or generosity in them, or how much they love your children and how much your children love them. You can’t imagine how they suffer when they hear about the horrible things your people or the people you think are your people are doing in Madrid, and they’re in distress just like me and your children at not knowing where you are or if those savages have done something to you. I think they make you angry and jealous. You don’t know how happy each of your professional accomplishments makes them. They respect you and don’t care if you’re a Republican and a Socialist and don’t go to Mass on Sunday or want our children to have a religious upbringing, as if my opinion didn’t matter. You despise them just because they’re Catholic and vote for the right and go to Mass and recite the rosary every day, even though they don’t hurt anybody. But you didn’t turn down the money my father gave us when we didn’t have anything, or the commissions you received thanks to him, and when you got it into your head to go to Germany even though the children were so young, you didn’t think twice about asking my father to let us live in his house while you were away because that would allow you to leave with no sense of guilt, besides saving you money as you wouldn’t have been able to live for a whole year in Germany on the grant the Council for Advanced Studies gave you. You aren’t grateful to them for accepting you with open arms even though other people in my family and from our class told them you didn’t have a cent when you courted me and were the son of a Socialist construction foreman and a caretaker on Calle Toledo. They’re reactionaries as all of you call them but they’ve always been much more generous with you than you’ve been with them. Had it not been for them and our children I would have rotted with loneliness all these years. What would I do without them now that you have gone back to Madrid even though you knew as well as we did that something very bad was going on there, you cared more about seeing your mistress than staying with your own children.

But he wouldn’t have been able to explain to his wife that the antagonism he felt toward her family was due not to ideological but to esthetic differences, the same silent antagonism he felt toward the inexhaustible Spanish ugliness of so many commonplace things, a kind of national depravity that offended his sense of beauty more deeply than his convictions regarding justice: the stuffed heads of bulls over the bars in taverns; the paprika red and saffron-substitute yellow of bullfight posters; folding chairs and carved desks that imitated the Spanish Renaissance; dolls in flamenco dresses, a curl on their forehead, which closed their eyes when leaned back and opened them as if resuscitated when they were upright again; rings with cubic stones; gold teeth in the brutal mouths of tycoons; the newspaper obituaries of dead children—he rose to heaven, he joined the angels—and their tragic white coffins; baroque moldings; excrescences carved in granite on the vulgar façades of banks; coat and hat racks made with the horns and hooves of deer or mountain goats; coats of arms for common last names made of glazed ceramic from Talavera; funeral announcements in the ABC or El Debate; photographs of King Alfonso XIII hunting, just a few days before he left the country, indifferent or blind to what was happening around him, leaning on his rifle beside the head of a dead deer, or erect and jovial next to a sacrifice of partridges or pheasants or hares, surrounded by gentlemen in hunting outfits and gaiters and servants in poor men’s berets and espadrilles and smiles diminished by toothless mouths. He sometimes thought his excessive anger had more to do with esthetics than ethics, with ugliness than injustice. In the rotunda of the Palace Hotel monarchist gentlemen raised their teacups and extended their little fingers adorned with a small ring and a very long polished nail. In the most successful movies characters profaned the marvelous technology of sound by breaking into folksongs, dressed in awful regional outfits, mounted on donkeys, leaning against window grilles hung with flowerpots, wearing broad-brimmed hats or berets or rustic bandannas. The Heraldo reported with patriotic fervor that at the beginning of the great bullfight for the festival of Our Lady of the Pillar in Zaragoza the matador’s team had performed the promenade to the vibrant rhythms of the “Himno de Riego,” the national anthem. In the house of the Ponce-Cañizares Salcedo family, at the end of a gloomy hallway, tiny electric candles burned in the small lamps framing a full-color print of Jesus of Medinaceli that had an artistic roof of Mudéjar inspiration and a small railing simulating an Andalusian balcony. In the Renaissance armchair in the dining room filled with dark wood furniture that imitated a style between Gothic and Moorish and had inlaid medallions of the Catholic sovereigns, Don Francisco de Asís Ponce-Cañizares, retired member of the Honorable Provincial Delegation of Madrid, read aloud in a grave voice the lead articles and parliamentary accounts in the ABC, and Doña Cecilia listened to him, half bewildered and half impatient, and said “Good” or “Of course” or “How shameful” each time Don Francisco de Asís concluded a paragraph in the cavernous tone of a sacred orator and at the same time noted the pangs of emotion and those of stomach upset, about which he’d inform the family in detail. Don Francisco de Asís was intoxicated by the apocalyptic prose of Calvo Sotelo’s speeches in Parliament and of reporters who spoke of Asiatic hordes or mobs filled with Bolshevik resentment or the virile martial joy of German youth cheering the Führer, waving olive branches, raising their right arms in unison in the stadiums. He liked words like “horde,” “mob,” “vortex,” “collapse,” and “collusion,” and as he read and became more emotional, his voice deepened and he accompanied his reading with oratorical gestures, angry blows on the table, an accusatory index finger. He loved sonorous verbal turns and expressions in Latin: alea iacta est; sic semper tyrannis; he who laughs last laughs best; better to die with honor than to live in shame; better honor without ships than ships without honor; the clarions of destiny; the moment of truth; the straw that broke the camel’s back. The fervent articles by correspondents in Germany and Italy and the Falangist publications his son Víctor brought home provided him with a poetic prose somewhat less old-fashioned but just as intoxicating and allowed him the gratification of feeling in tune with the youthful dynamism of the new day. But it was true that toward Ignacio Abel he’d always demonstrated a resounding affection of bear hugs and kisses that included a curious mixture of admiration and indulgence: admiration of his son-in-law’s brilliance and the tenacity with which he overcame the difficulties of his origins and the early deaths of his parents; indulgence of his political convictions, which he attributed, if he thought about them at all, more to a sentimental loyalty to the memory of his Republican and Socialist father than to real personal radicalism. How could he be an extremist and still be so fond of well-cut suits and good manners? If Ignacio Abel was a Socialist, he had to be one in the civilized, semi-British mode of Don Julián Besteiro or Don Fernando de los Ríos. But according to the uncle who was a priest, he shouldn’t let himself be deceived, because those Socialists were the worst ones, the most insidious! Who but Fernando de los Ríos, with all his unctuous manners, had devised the blasphemous divorce law when he was minister of justice? Deep down, Don Francisco de Asís must have compared the perseverance and integrity of his son-in-law, who came from nothing and created himself, with the uselessness of his own son, who always had everything but couldn’t complete his law degree and spent years bouncing from one job to another, not understanding anything, his head filled with stupidities, becoming involved in futile projects and dubious business schemes, dazzled now by a Falangist enthusiasm that in Don Francisco de Asís’s heart provoked not sympathy but alarm and distrust. He was afraid something awful would happen to his son, that he’d take part in a conspiracy and be sent to prison, or that one day he’d end up dead in the street after one of those gunfights between Falangists and Communists, he was always so inept, as a boy so easily intimidated in spite of his bravado.

How different from his son-in-law, almost his other son, so serious and aloof, walking into the garden that morning with his firm bearing, his solid way of being in the world, his dark double-breasted suit, his shoes — made to measure in the best English shoe store in Madrid — stepping on the gravel, holding the briefcase that the girl took from him so she could carry it, heavy with documents and blueprints that required his attention even on a day off, for he had a position with a great deal of responsibility in the construction of University City, as Don Francisco de Asís took pleasure in telling his friends. In fact, El Sol had published Ignacio Abel’s photograph a few days earlier, and Don Francisco de Asís — breaking with custom because he defined himself as an unyielding reader of the ABC—had bought that paper and read aloud to Doña Cecilia the article on their son-in-law’s talk at the Student Residence, and then cut out the page and kept it in a folder in the imitation Renaissance desk in his study. Not very shrewd, in no way inclined to think ill of anyone, because of elderly innocence or lack of imagination or excessive reverence for the formalities, Don Francisco de Asís, as he himself said, would have put his hand in fire for his son-in-law, who didn’t smoke, barely drank more than a glass of wine at meals, never raised his voice, not even when discussing politics, which rarely happened, not even at meals when his brother-in-law Víctor or the uncle the priest would hotly argue the calamity of the Republic, the constant anarchy, the insolence of the workers, the need in Spain for a providential figure like the Duce or the Führer, or at least the sadly missed General Primo de Rivera, a strong man. On such occasions his son-in-law didn’t respond, never used an uncouth word; he was a Socialist but thanks to his work had been able to buy a car and a spacious apartment with an elevator in the most elegant section of Calle Príncipe de Vergara, between Goya and Lista no less; he sent the children to the Institute School so they’d have a secular education, and didn’t permit scapulars to be hung around their necks, but he hadn’t opposed their taking Communion or their mother teaching them prayers; he didn’t waste his evenings sitting idly in cafés; the time he didn’t devote to his work he spent with his wife and two children, Don Francisco de Asís’s only two grandchildren, who sadly wouldn’t carry to the next generation the family name of Ponce-Cañizares. Last night he probably worked late at University City and early this morning drove to the house in the Sierra. Immune to his habitual coldness, Don Francisco de Asís offered a festive celebration when he saw his son-in-law, and gave him a wet kiss of welcome on each cheek. The two children struggled to be closer to him, to carry his briefcase and recount the adventures and explorations of the past few days, and they competed to mention the books they had read. They reminded him to take them and their mother that afternoon to the irrigation pond; they asked him if what he’d promised before his arrival was true, that he wouldn’t leave tomorrow, Sunday afternoon, but would drive them back to Madrid on Monday morning. When he saw his wife, he looked her in the eye and kissed her on the lips, and his son saw from behind how he put his hand on her waist and pressed her lightly to him.

The benevolent attitude that Adela’s extreme sensitivity to him detected with relief and almost with gratitude was in fact the consequence of his deception. Perhaps her husband wouldn’t have placed his hand on her waist when he kissed her if he hadn’t embraced another woman the previous afternoon; his gestures of tenderness compensated for the offense she didn’t know she’d received; they were the remnants of an effusiveness another woman had awakened; the result of the liar’s relief at not being caught; the joy of the man who has seen in himself the surge of a desire he no longer imagined possible in his life and has reached a satisfaction he didn’t recall ever experiencing. As they’d often done when the children were small, that afternoon they walked with them on the path that led through pine groves and thickets of rockrose to the irrigation pond — the reservoir that had fed the old electrical power plant, a half-abandoned building at the edge. From time to time they caught sight of an unsociable custodian who once frightened the children and served as a character in their stories about enchanted houses beside a lake. That Ignacio Abel had so readily agreed to the excursion was another indication of his good mood and not merely his impatience to leave the close familial ambience, which after the snores of siesta culminated in praying the rosary, followed by a comforting snack of thick hot chocolate and anise biscuits, the work of Doña Cecilia’s legendary confectionery talent. The four of them, away from the others, seemed to commemorate an earlier time it wasn’t difficult to imagine as happier, the summers when the children were small, when their hands had to be held on the path and they tired so quickly that their father carried them on his shoulders, so small they had to be watched constantly so they wouldn’t go in the deep parts of the pond. They played Hansel and Gretel and left breadcrumbs along the path, and on the way back they would see whether birds had eaten them. But if they went too far into the game, the boy would burst into tears because he really was afraid his parents would abandon them, and he’d put his arms around Adela’s legs, his little face red and wet with tears while his sister laughed. The water in the pond had a green transparency and reflected on its surface the tops of the pines and the dark mass of the brick building that once housed turbines. The October sun was still high, gilding the bluish distances, the soft afternoon colors. The children looked for flat stones along the edge, then threw them at well-aimed angles over the smooth surface of the water, shouting their disagreement, returning to the old complicity of games now that both had left early childhood but were closer to it than either imagined. His father’s camera hung around Miguel’s neck, and as they walked in the woods he imagined he was making his way through the Amazon jungle or the heart of Africa, a solitary reporter because his sister didn’t want to join him in the game. Sitting on the grass in the warm afternoon air, Ignacio Abel and Adela also seemed to have returned to an earlier time, the young father and mother the children see at a protective distance, engaged in their mysterious conversations but also vigilant, perhaps anxious, afraid an accident or a mishap might occur if they looked away even for a moment from the children. How strange to have Adela so close when she didn’t know anything, to hold her open, melancholy gaze and not awaken any suspicion in her, to speak to her so naturally with no need to pretend or lie. He observed Adela while he listened to her. As had happened a few nights earlier in the Residence, he saw her as he hadn’t seen her for some time, precisely the time when she lost the last embers of her youth. A click sounded and Miguel had taken their picture from the edge of the pond.

“Are you really planning to go to America next year? And can you take us with you?”

She knew him too well not to be aware that his mood could be temporary. She was grateful for the gestures of tenderness, the quick kiss on the lips, the hand at her waist, but she protected herself instinctively against disappointment and at the same time protected her children, especially the boy, who was more fragile and also closer to her, with a more excitable imagination: now, at the pond’s edge, he talked to his sister about traveling to America on ocean liners or airplanes, made exaggerated gestures with his arms to suggest the size of things, the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty.

“I have to consult with Negrín first. And I have to see what they offer and how long I’ll have to stay. However it turns out, you’ll all come with me.”

But Adela detected a touch of insincerity in his voice, though he himself didn’t know he wasn’t telling the whole truth. Now he was in the two worlds, two simultaneous times, yesterday afternoon with Judith and today with Adela and the children, in the dim light of the bar at the Florida and in the comfortable sun at the edge of the pond, smelling rockrose and thyme and resin, not divided but duplicated, ablaze with love and at the same time settled into the solid routine he’d constructed over the years, which that afternoon reached a kind of visual plenitude, like a completed painting, like the maturation of the last fruits of October, pomegranates and quince, yellow squash, persimmons, bursting golden grapes in the garden. He had so little experience, or so little capacity for real introspection, he didn’t imagine the guilt and anguish lying in wait; he didn’t even ask himself what Judith Biely might be feeling. She didn’t exist for him in an autonomous, complete way but only as a projection of his own desire.

“What are you thinking about?”

“Nothing, work.”

“You seemed to be in another world.”

“Perhaps I ought to go back to Madrid tomorrow afternoon.”

“You promised the children we’d drive back together early on Monday.”

“If I go back, it’s not on a whim.”

“Don’t tell them you’ll take them to America if you’re not going to do it. Don’t make promises you know you won’t keep.”

“And you, would you like to make the trip?”

“What I’d like is never to be separated from you. Where we are doesn’t matter.”

She blushed when she said this and looked younger. She resembled the overly shy woman who no longer counted on finding a man, which she’d been when they met, the one for whom her parents predicted the same familial destiny as the maiden aunts, with whom she sometimes spent Sunday afternoons praying the rosary. With her wide hips settled on the warm grass beside the pond, her ankles tended to swell. Her black hair styled with an out-of-date wave made her seem older. But her eyes suddenly looked as they had fifteen years earlier and had a passionate, vulnerable expression, as if she’d passed from not expecting anything to wanting it all, from conformity to audacity, and from there to anticipated disillusionment, to skepticism regarding what life could offer her. Now she might have wished that her children weren’t so near, that they didn’t shout so much while they looked for smooth stones along the edge and then threw them at the water. For her it was a contretemps when they approached, tired and hungry, their cheeks reddened by exercise and the Sierra breeze, demanding the snack they’d brought in a wicker basket. For Ignacio Abel it was a relief. The sun began to go down behind the pines, the air acquired a touch of dampness that intensified the mountain odors, the smell of thyme and rockrose and dry pine needles. The bells and the lowing of cows, the smaller bells of sheep, emphasized acoustically the sensation of amplitude and distance. If the air had been clearer, the white smudge of Madrid would have been visible on the horizon. It would be cold as soon as the setting sun no longer reached the pond, raising a faint golden mist over it. Secretly disloyal, unpunished in his dissimulation, Ignacio Abel decided he’d invent an excuse to return to Madrid on Sunday afternoon. He wouldn’t wait until then to hear Judith Biely’s voice; he’d go to the village to buy something and try to call her from the only phone, located in the station café. He looked up, coming out of his absorption, his secret trip to that other, invisible, contiguous world. Sitting on a rock, his daughter ate a sandwich and read a novel by Jules Verne. Adela took a few awkward steps along the bank, ridding her legs of numbness, brushing pine needles and grass stems from her skirt. His son was looking at him with wide-open eyes, as if he’d read his mind and was aware of his deceit, as if he already knew that the next afternoon his father would go back to Madrid alone, and if he went to America, he would also go alone.